Fury (The Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi Series Book 17)

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Then the pockmarked man shouted,“Allah Akbar” and placed the knife at her brother’s throat. “Allah Akbar,” Zak said and began to howl.

  Lucy woke trembling, her body covered in sweat. “David,” she whispered in the dark. As if in answer, there was a sudden howling that made her heart jump like a panicked rabbit’s. “Allah Akbar,” she prayed in Arabic. “God is great.”

  It took her a moment to realize that she was lying on a bed at the Sagebrush Inn on the outskirts of Taos, New Mexico, and that the person sleeping next to her was her boyfriend, Ned Blanchet. The howling was provided by a choir of coyotes out in the desert singing in the moonlight, which streamed in through the window. She looked at the clock on the nightstand. Dawn in an hour, she thought. Recalling the dream, she shuddered, but then chided herself for being a baby, afraid of nightmares. The He in her dreams, the man with the gaunt face and burning eyes, David Grale, was dead. He wasn’t chasing terrorists through a cave, slashing their throats in an apocalyptic fury.

  She’d met Grale a half-dozen years earlier and developed a schoolgirl crush on the handsome young Catholic lay worker. The strange thing was, that crush had not entirely disappeared even when she discovered he was also a murderous psychopath who had slaughtered a number of evildoers he believed preyed upon homeless men.

  Grale had tried to explain to her that the people he killed were possessed by demons and that he’d been charged by God with their execution. “We’re at war, Lucy,” he’d told her. “Like it or not, the forces of good and evil are marshaling for the big showdown. Armageddon. And there will be no watching from the sidelines, no spectators.” He further explained that New York City was a sort of epicenter for this battle, drawing the minions of evil like a magnet attracts iron filings.

  Given her own Catholic-bred experiences with the metaphysical—she believed that during times of stress a martyred sixteenth-century saint named Teresa de Alhuma appeared to counsel her—Lucy had not entirely ruled out Grale’s basic premise. She sensed that what he said was, in some fashion, the truth.

  Lucy even bought into the notion that her family—especially her father, Roger “Butch” Karp, the district attorney of Manhattan, and mother, Marlene Ciampi—were unknowingly but inextricably playing out their roles in the great drama that was unfolding. But her church’s philosophy, and her own personal belief, was that no human life was beyond redemption, and she couldn’t countenance Grale’s butchering of other people…even if they were possessed by demons.

  Hunted by the police and increasingly consumed by his cause, Grale had disappeared into the city’s massive labyrinth of tunnels and sewers—some of them dating back to the earliest days of the city and long forgotten. There he’d become a sort of spiritual leader to what he called the Mole People. Homeless outcasts—many of them also bordering on the insane—they lived in the shadow world beneath the teeming city, emerging occasionally to forage and beg, and to gather news.

  At unpredictable moments, Grale would resurface into Lucy’s life. Each appearance would leave her troubled by the dichotomy of a man who judged and condemned to death others without even the benefit of a trial, and the haunted, gentle social worker named David. Twice recently he had shown up in the nick of time to rescue her and a family member.

  The most recent rescue by Grale had been that summer. The murderous Catholic priest Hans Lichner, an immense bear of a man, had been preparing to sacrifice one of Lucy’s twin brothers, Zak, on the altar in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Lichner’s predilection for sexually abusing and then murdering young boys had been sanctioned by Andrew Kane, who was using the killer for his own purposes—one of them to eventually bring down the Catholic Church in New York through scandal and corruption.

  Grale would have won the ensuing knife fight and, in fact, was about to deliver the coup de grâce, except that Lucy, ever the humanitarian, screamed for him to stop. With Grale momentarily distracted, Lichner turned the tables and planted his knife in his opponent’s stomach. Fortunately for Zak and Lucy, John Jojola, who had tracked the monster to the cathedral, was there to protect them. Lichner had proved no match for Jojola’s speed and skill, though it was too late to help David Grale.

  Lying in a pool of New Mexican moonlight that fell across her bed, Lucy recalled when Jojola stooped next to Grale and felt for signs of life. Then he’d looked at her and shaken his head. She’d burst into tears, but Jojola wouldn’t let her remain with the body.

  Later when other cops arrived, they found large pools of blood but no bodies. DNA tests showed that the blood came from two different people, but who they were remained a mystery to the authorities. The medical examiner told Lucy’s father that neither man could have survived the loss of so much blood unless they received immediate medical attention, including massive transfusions.

  Just a typical summer for the Karp/Ciampi clan, Lucy thought as she sat up. A summer in which she’d almost lost her life and would have except for the man who slept next to her.

  While still in Taos, before the trail led them to Lichner, she and her mother had been the targets of the local sheriff, who’d been hired by Kane to keep an eye on his “clients” at a retreat. When Marlene and Jojola started getting too close, the sheriff had tried to kill them all. But then a young cowboy had ridden to her rescue.

  Ned was snoring like a desert thunderstorm, it being one of the rare mornings when he didn’t have to be out before dawn taking care of his boss’s cattle. Lucy swung her legs over the edge of the bed, trying not to wake him. But Ned was a light sleeper, used to sacking out on the ground with an ear tuned for signs that his bovine charges or his horse were in trouble.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked sleepily.

  Lucy leaned over and kissed him, lingering for a moment. She loved the scrubbed soapy smell of him, with just a hint of the leather and horses he worked with, that never quite seemed to leave him even after a shower. Except for Felix Tighe’s assault, which Lucy chose not to count, they’d both been virgins when they met. His courting had been shy and slow; he hadn’t even tried to kiss her until she demanded that he accept it as his reward after saving her life.

  Still, it surprised Lucy that she’d taken him as her lover. A deeply religious young woman, she’d sworn that she’d remain chaste until her marriage. And to be honest, it hadn’t been all that difficult to remain a virgin.

  She was a brilliant student with a savant’s gift for languages. But for most of her life, Lucy had done little to dispel the first impression men had of her, which was of a bookish prude whose intelligence was frightening to most males. Combined with a beaklike nose and a thin angular body, the image had not helped her attract a lot of suitors. Nor had she cared…much.

  When she came to New Mexico, she did have a boyfriend back East, a nice young man named Dan Heeney, who’d certainly wanted to be the first. She’d thought that he probably would be, but up to that point she’d easily managed to put him off by saying she simply wasn’t ready. Nor would she be until marriage.

  Yet she felt no shame as she looked at Ned. His blue eyes were only half open but still startling in their clarity and brilliance. He wasn’t especially handsome—his thin features a bit too irregular, his teeth never having been introduced to an orthodontist, and his ears standing out like satellite dishes. But a life spent outdoors in the Southwest sun gave his face a tanned, rugged quality that mirrored the land he worked and loved. And she loved how she could see his blue eyes sparkle even when his cowboy hat—worn low so that he had to look up from under the brim—shaded his face.

  He wasn’t even well educated, at least not in a book sense, not even a high school diploma. But he was smart, and maybe it was the wide-open spaces that also made him a deep thinker. His long silences weren’t because he had nothing to say; he just liked to think before he spoke. And when he did speak, it was with a simple sort of eloquence that didn’t contain a lot of fifty-cent words but was dense with meaning and perception. And while he might not have been a master of m
any languages, he spoke Spanish—having grown up in a largely Hispanic culture—as if he’d been born to it.

  Lucy traced his form beneath the quilt. He wasn’t a big guy, but he had the fine, lithe body of someone who’d earned his ropelike muscles through hard work, not in a gym.

  No, she had not planned on becoming his lover, and in the glow after it happened, she was surprised at the lack of guilt she felt—not for the broken vow of chastity, nor, at the time, her “betrayal” of Dan. Making love to Ned had come as naturally as taking a warm shower. She wasn’t sure if this relationship was forever, but there were times when it certainly felt like it, and she would contemplate what life would be like as a ranch hand’s wife. But then she’d stop herself, doubting whether anything so normal would ever be hers.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she lied. “Just restless. I think I’ll go for a morning hike.”

  Ned started to rise. “Want me to go?”

  Lucy pushed him back down. “No, it’s your day off, cowboy,” she said, as always both amused and flattered by his Old West gallantry. “Roll over and go back to sleep. Maybe when I get back we’ll see if you’ve recovered sufficiently from last night’s labors.”

  Ned lifted the quilt and glanced underneath before looking back at her with a mischievous grin. “I think I’m recovered just fine, ma’am,” he said, allowing his eyes to take in her naked body as she sat on the edge of the bed. He made a grab for her, but she darted away with a giggle.

  Just to tease him, Lucy made a show of stretching and at the same time looked at herself in the mirror. New Mexico had been good for her. She’d gained twenty pounds, having discovered an addiction to tamales and blue-corn tortilla burritos smothered in green pork chili. Every pound of it had been needed and all of it seemed to have settled in just the right places to give her a more womanly figure. The East Coast pallor that she’d arrived with had turned to a tan from spending a lot of time outdoors with Ned. Her face had filled out, too, which made the nose less noticeable, and she was a handsome, even beautiful, young woman.

  Now Ned made a groaning noise, and she decided that she had better stop teasing him if she wanted to go for her walk. She quickly stepped into long underwear and wool socks, then pulled on polar fleece outerwear followed by a ski jacket until she was covered in warm things from head to toe. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours, and you’d best be ready, pard’ner,” she drawled with a western twang, which, given her abilities with languages, was right on.

  “Count on it, ma’am,” he drawled back as she opened the door and went out.

  Lucy paused for a moment outside the door to adjust to the shock of the brisk December air, then walked quickly to the new Chevy F-10 truck her mother had bought for her after she returned from New York in September. As she walked, her boots squeaked in two inches of new-fallen snow and her breath puffed like a steam locomotive. She turned the ignition and the truck protested with a high-pitched squeal until it turned over and began to purr like a big circus cat.

  A few minutes later, she was driving west toward the Rio Grande Gorge. With few other cars on the road, it seemed as if she had the entire high plains desert to herself—a white-blanketed, almost dreamlike landscape punctuated by lonely buttes and sudden gashes in the ground called arroyos that appeared suddenly in what had looked flat as a still pond.

  By the time she reached the Taos Gorge Bridge, the longest single-span steel bridge in the world, the sky was just beginning to grow a shade lighter in the east. Once across, Lucy turned right, heading north along a four-wheel-drive track that paralleled the eight-hundred-foot deep gorge. At one point the road drew near the edge of the gorge and she had to look away. That was the place she and her mother had gone over the edge when the sheriff shot out one of their tires. Only the presence of a tree that grew from the side of the cliff had saved them from plunging to their deaths. Even then, the tree was giving way when Ned, who’d heard the shot from a distance and rode up on his horse, threw his lariat around her and pulled her to safety.

  Of course, Grale would have said that she and her mother had been saved by divine providence. He would have pointed out that cowboys who rode their horses to the rescue of damsels in distress were a metaphor for the struggle between good and evil with the good cowboys—God’s angels—triumphing in the end.

  Again with Grale, she thought. He’s dead. With an effort she turned her thoughts from the madman and the cliff’s edge and toward a steep granite hill that jutted up and out over the gorge like a ship’s prow.

  A man stood on the edge, wrapped in a blanket, facing the east toward Taos Mountain. But she wasn’t surprised; she’d expected to find him there.

  John Jojola was another thread she suspected was part of the tapestry that connected her family to people like Grale. Even the Tighes and Lichners of the world, not to mention her father’s latest and most dangerous adversary, Andrew Kane, were woven in and out, and without which holes would have appeared.

  Lucy parked at the bottom of the path that led up the hill to the edge of the gorge. She walked up the path but paused below the summit, not wanting to disturb his reverie…or get too close to the edge.

  “Good morning, Lucy,” Jojola said after a minute. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “No. Bad dreams,” she replied.

  Jojola was silent, his eyes fixed on the east as if it were somehow important to witness where the first ray of the sun would appear over Taos Mountain. He’s looking for signs, she thought.

  She knew from the times she’d spent with him, as well as conversations about him with her mother, that John Jojola was a man who believed that he could sometimes communicate with the spirit world. A trait, he said, that was not uncommon with his people, at least those who still practiced the old ways. It might be the appearance of an eagle where none had been a moment before, or a dream conversation with a coyote across a campfire. Sometimes it meant nothing, but other times the spirits, he said, would give him messages about the future—if he could discern what they meant—or guide him toward the answers to difficult questions.

  Lucy was hoping he might impart some piece of ancient Native American wisdom, telling her not to worry about the dreams. But he just sighed and said, “Yeah, me too.”

  The resignation in his voice frightened Lucy. Outside her father, if there was a rock of a man in the world, he was John Jojola. As far as she could tell, he feared nothing, except maybe liquor. He’d returned from Vietnam a haunted man who’d lost his childhood friend, Charlie Many Horses, to a Vietcong leader he knew only by his Vietnamese nickname, Cop, the Tiger. He’d sworn to find and kill Cop, but the man had eluded him. Back in Taos, he’d turned to the bottle to quiet the ghosts of his friend, who was one of the spirits, as well as those of the many men he’d killed who haunted his dreams. Many Horses, however, had remained a friend and his advice was always helpful. Jojola’s wife, herself an alcoholic, had left him and their son, Charlie, who’d been named for his friend. He’d sobered up and turned his life around for his son and immersed himself in the ancient ways of his people so that his son would know his heritage.

  Jojola turned to face Lucy. Whenever she looked at him she thought of the sepia-toned photogravures by turn-of-the-century photographer E. S. Curtis of the western American tribes—the dark, searching eyes above the wide cheekbones and a nose that was even more beaklike than her own, although she thought of his as strong. His chest was barrel-shaped, his arms long and muscular. His bowed legs seemed too short for his torso, but she also knew from hikes with him that neither she nor Ned, who was no slouch, could keep up with him. And while they would be puffing and panting, he’d move effortlessly, his eyes constantly searching the ground and sky around him.

  “So these dreams,” he said, “is your friend David Grale in them?”

  Lucy blinked but nodded. “Yes,” she said. “And other men.”

  “Bad men.”

  “Yes…and…and my brother Zak.”

  Jojola nodded solemnly. “This
takes place in a cave.”

  “You’ve had the same dream.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes,” he replied, then shrugged. “I guess. All dreams are different.”

  A flicker of some quickly hidden emotion that she found even more disquieting than his tone flew across his eyes. She wasn’t sure what it was, but suddenly she felt sorry for him. Then he smiled, his large white teeth showing like snow on a mountaintop against his bronze skin in the gathering light, and pointed east.

  Lucy turned and at first saw nothing but the landscape, dominated by Taos Mountain, behind which the sun was preparing for a grand entrance. Then she saw it. “An eagle,” she said. She knew that Jojola considered eagles to be his totem, an animal spirit guide.

  As they watched, the eagle continued east toward the mountain. Then, just as the bird was about to climb into the sky above the peak, the first rays of the sun shot over the top and the eagle disappeared into the golden light.

  “Wow,” she said. “I guess that means something, eh?”

  “Yeah,” Jojola said and laughed. “I guess that I’ll get to see what New York City looks like at Christmas.”

  Lucy laughed, too, but then noticed that the strange look had returned to his eyes. “What’s wrong, John?”

  Jojola didn’t answer her right away but instead allowed the blanket to slip from his shoulders as he lifted his arms. He stood that way until the sun was fully over the top of the mountain, then slowly let his arms sink back to his sides.

  “I don’t want to go,” he said at last. “In Vietnam, I had to crawl through tunnels hunting men. On several occasions I almost became the hunted, and it troubled me that I would die beneath the ground, my soul trapped by the earth to rot with my body. I don’t want to die where the sun cannot find me and carry my spirit up with the eagles. I’m afraid, Lucy. Afraid that if I go to New York and these caves are more than in our dreams, I may never see this place again.”