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

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “I don’t know,” Jojola said, “but when bears talk, I listen.” He turned back to Karp. “The bear is a very special animal to most Native American tribes. He is the most powerful animal in the wild, but he doesn’t rely on just brute strength. He is clever and will try to solve a puzzle before turning to force as a last resort. The bear is thought to be wise and contemplative because for four months of the year he hibernates and thinks deep thoughts before emerging in the spring to put those thoughts into action. Sometimes he appears to be moving so slow that you cannot imagine he has another speed, but if he charges, he can outrun a horse. Oh, and if someone is stupid enough to tangle with an angry bear, the bear usually wins.”

  Karp turned the fetish over in his hand. It was crudely chipped out of some sort of quartz or a similar mineral he couldn’t identify. He liked the feel of the stone; as small as it was, the figure did seem to imply a creature of power. “Thank you, John,” he said. “For the bear and the thought.”

  Marlene handed Jojola a box. He opened it and lifted out a strange-looking headset with what looked like small binoculars attached.

  “Cool!” Zak shouted. “Night-vision goggles!”

  “A Rigel 3250 with built-in infrared for illumination even in total darkness,” explained Giancarlo, who’d helped his mother pick it out at the Sharper Image and knew all the details by heart. “It weighs less than a pound, which makes it one of the lightest on the market.”

  Karp thought that Jojola’s bronze face looked sad for a moment—the lines around the eyes and mouth deeper, his brown eyes seeing something not in the room. But then the Indian smiled and said, “It is a wonderful gift.”

  Marlene started to reply, then choked up a little before finally shrugging as if she’d given him a pot holder. “You said that it’s dark where you’re going.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Karp asked.

  “Yeah, where’s John going?” Giancarlo wanted to know.

  “He just got here,” Zak complained.

  “It’s nothing,” Jojola said. “I just have some business to attend to for a few days. I’ll see you after that.”

  “Cool,” Zak exclaimed. “Commando stuff like when you were in Vietnam?”

  “Nah, nothin’ like that…just looking around. We’ll talk about it some other time. This is Christmas morning, and I think there’s more presents under the tree.”

  Lucy and Ned then exchanged gifts. She’d bought him a new pair of boots and he gave her a silver heart-shaped locket with a photograph of his face inside. “So you never forget what I look like,” he said and kissed her gently on the lips, a gesture that sent a spasm of pain clutching at Karp’s frontal lobe.

  When all the other gifts had been handed out, Karp gave Marlene a small box. She opened it and found a key. “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Why, it’s the key to my heart,” he replied.

  “Oh, honey, that’s so sweet…. But come on, what is it really?”

  “Can’t tell you yet,” Karp said. “You have to wait until after the New Year.”

  “I’m supposed to wait until after the first to learn what the mystery key for my Christmas present fits?” she said. “That’s not fair. I’ll go crazy wondering what it is.”

  “Sorry, can’t tell.”

  The twins and Lucy all giggled. Marlene glared at them all, one at a time. “Okay, I get it. This is a conspiracy to drive me insane and lock me up in some looney bin so Karp can bring his little Trixie into my bed, and you kids can run amok with no parental supervision.”

  “Guilty as charged,” Karp said.

  “Can Ned and I take Gilgamesh back to New Mexico?” Lucy laughed.

  “Who’s Trixie?” asked the twins.

  Marlene swore that she would catch them when they were alone “and yank fingernails until someone cracks.” But no one seemed to be giving in to fear at the moment, so they moved on to a simple brunch of pastries and juices.

  Afterward, Karp lay down on the couch, determined to have a little quality family time watching the twins play with their new toys. But the games had beeped, pinged, and chimed until he felt as if he’d been chained to the floor of a Las Vegas casino, right next to the nickel slots. Finally he couldn’t take it anymore and demanded that all electronic “anythings” be banned from the living room for the rest of the day.

  The boys complied and took the games back to their room. But then the little monsters returned with their nonelectronic plastic samurai swords and armor—a gift from Uncle Ray, whom Karp intended to beat over the head with a law book when he saw him again—and commenced to hack at each other and then feigned loud, protracted, yet heroic deaths by ritual seppuku.

  When Ned mercifully offered to show the twins the Peacemaker, Karp didn’t put up a fight. “Anything to keep them quiet for a few minutes,” he moaned. “But no firing blanks. No shouting. And no death scenes.”

  There’d been a blissful hour of lying on the coach with an ice bag on his head, while the twins and Ned talked quietly and practiced their quick draws. But twelve-year-old boys cannot help but occasionally shriek with joy at the heft and feel of a real cowboy gun, so he’d finally given up any pretense of quality time with anyone and retreated to his bedroom.

  A little while later, Marlene popped her head in long enough to say that she and the boys were going to her parents’ house to drop off presents. “I’ll give them your holiday wishes.”

  He must have slept because the next thing he knew, she was back opening the door again. She walked in and closed it behind her. Kicking off her shoes, she crawled up on the bed next to him and curled up against his chest.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “Well, if you don’t mind the woman who gave you life referring to you by your sister’s name…or watching your father try not to cry as he watches his wife disappear inside of the shell of a woman he no longer knows…it went as well as can be expected.”

  He felt her body trembling and realized that she was crying. He wished that he could cover her with his own body and shield her from the pain, but there was nothing he could do except hold her.

  At last she stopped crying and sat up. “Let’s go see the kids,” she said. “You up for it, Lazarus?”

  “Sure,” he replied, sitting up and wincing as someone stuck a needle in his cerebral cortex.

  In the living room, he looked around. “Where’re Lucy and Ned, and John, for that matter?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Marlene replied. “They were gone when I got back.”

  Karp turned his attention to the twins, who were sitting somberly on the couch. He wondered if they were crashing from their sugar buzz of the morning. “How were Pops and Grammy?”

  “Grammy didn’t know who we were,” Zak said dejectedly.

  “A lot of people confuse you and Giancarlo,” he’d replied.

  “No, I mean she didn’t know who any of us were,” he said, angrily wiping at the tears that rolled down his cheeks. “She kept calling Mom ‘Josephine’ and thought we were the neighbor boys from down the street.”

  “She asked if we were the naughty kids who ripped up her flower garden yesterday,” Giancarlo said, his lip trembling. “She didn’t know it was Christmas. She saw the presents and thought it was her birthday. She even opened Grandpa’s presents. Why is this happening to her?”

  Karp’s heart suddenly ached for his children. Concetta Ciampi was the only grandmother they’d ever known. She’d been there for their births. She’d watched over them when their busy parents had been too consumed with work, changing their diapers and reading bedtime stories. Now she was being taken from them in the cruelest way imaginable. The outward appearance was the same, but the woman inside was leaving them.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But you need to know that she can’t help what is happening to her.”

  “Is she dying?” Zak sniffled.

  “In a way,” Karp replied. “But her mind is dying before her body is ready. We’ve j
ust got to do our best to let her know that we still love her—that we understand that she’s still in there somewhere—and support Grandpa, too. This is very hard on him.”

  Later that night, the boys had settled onto the couch with him and Marlene to watch It’s a Wonderful Life. He sent a silent thank-you to Frank Capra, wherever he was, for the film’s life-affirming message.

  The credits were rolling, and the twins had been sent off to bed, when Lucy and Ned—whom Karp thought looked a little like Alan Ladd in the movie Shane with his new coat and old cowboy hat—returned.

  “Where’s John?” Marlene asked.

  Lucy looked troubled. “Gone…for now.”

  “What do you mean gone?” Karp asked. “What was all that heart-of-darkness stuff about earlier?”

  “He went to find David Grale.”

  “David Grale is dead. He bled to death at the altar in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”

  “I know, Daddy,” Lucy said. “He knows it, too. But he’s been having this dream, and, well, he says he needs to at least try to locate Grale.”

  “Why? What’s supposed to happen if he doesn’t?” Karp asked. He didn’t like all this spiritual mumbo jumbo; it bothered him in a way he didn’t understand, which made him irritable.

  “He won’t say…not exactly,” Lucy said as Ned stepped behind and wrapped his arms around her.

  Karp tried to ignore the way his daughter seemed to melt into the cowboy. “Well, what did he say inexactly, then?”

  “Oh, just that tens of thousands of people might die. A little Armageddon, New York style.”

  Karp made another mental note to talk to John about doomsday prophecies around his spiritually impressionable daughter. “Where was he going?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t think he did either. Just that it was going to be dark…. Sorry, Dad, I don’t know any more than that and I’m tired. It’s been a long day, and I want to go to bed. I love you.”

  Lucy then led Ned off to her room. Karp looked away rather than watch the pair disappear down the hallway. “They’re naked in there, you know.”

  Karp asked Marlene if she knew where Jojola was going. But she either didn’t know much or she didn’t want to talk about it. All in all, it’s a strange way to end Christmas Day, he thought. But the pathos wasn’t over yet.

  As he and Marlene lay in bed that night, the conversation had again turned to her parents, especially her father’s growing frustration and instability.

  “I’m worried about what he’s going to do,” Marlene said.

  “You mean when she dies?”

  “No. I’m worried that he may snap and hurt her. He’s going crazy with the fear that something is going to happen to her on one hand, and the guilt of wishing that she’d just die on the other.”

  “Maybe it really is time to put her in a nursing home,” Karp said.

  Marlene shook her head. “I asked him again today, pleaded with him. But he won’t hear of it. It’s the guilt. He said, ‘What if she’s in there somewhere, waiting for me to come and get her out, but she can’t tell me how. I can’t just take her from the home she loves. I can’t be that cruel.’ So he just sits there hating what she’s becoming, and hating himself for it.”

  She turned to Karp and put her hand on his chest. “If I ever have Alzheimer’s and I can’t do it myself,” she said, “I want you to shoot me before you start to hate me.”

  “I could never hate you.”

  “I’m sure my father would have said the same thing.”

  23

  Sunday, December 26

  JOHN JOJOLA JOINED LUCY AND NED AT A SMALL THAI BISTRO on Bayard and Bowery. He’d dressed for dark work over his thermal underwear—black waterproof boots, black pants, black turtleneck. He carried a small black knapsack containing the Rigel 3250 goggles, a small flashlight, black gloves, a black ski mask, and his fourteen-inch, razor-sharp hunting knife. Marlene had tried to give him a gun before she left with the boys, but he turned her down. “I’m going to find a man,” he said, “not kill one. My knife should be sufficient for the rats.”

  The meal ended when an immense hairy man appeared in front of the restaurant and pressed his incredibly filthy face against the window in an effort to see in. His brown-button eyes found the trio and locked on Jojola.

  “There’s Booger,” Lucy announced and turned to Jojola. “It’s not too late to stop this and just come home.” She didn’t sound as if she thought she’d convince him, and she was right.

  “I can’t, Lucy,” Jojola said. “I had the dream again last night. Charlie said I’m running out of time.”

  The dream was always the same, with only minor variations. In it he was running, crouched over through low, narrow tunnels like those he’d encountered in Vietnam when he was pursuing the Vietcong into their underground lairs. As he ran, he passed sudden openings leading off into the dark, any of which could hide an enemy who waited to leap out and kill him.

  In the dream, Jojola was pursuing a Vietcong leader he had faced during the war, known only by his Vietnamese nickname Cop, which meant Tiger. A former teacher, Cop blamed the South Vietnamese government for the murder of his family, and was the most ferocious and intelligent of the men he and his childhood friend and army recon partner, Charlie Many Horses, had been assigned to track and kill. Always, Cop had managed to stay a step ahead of them.

  Once, during the war, Jojola and Charlie Many Horses had been dropped by helicopter into a valley where villagers had reported sightings of the guerilla leader. The two split up to reconnoiter the area when Jojola jumped a Vietcong soldier who was preoccupied with trying to disguise the entrance to an underground bunker. Prodded by Jojola’s knife, the man pointed into the hole and said, “Cop.”

  Unable to deal with a prisoner, Jojola had been forced to slit the man’s throat and drag him into the bush before returning to the hole. He knew he should wait for Charlie. He also knew Cop was near but rarely stayed anywhere for long.

  Jojola had hesitated outside the hole. He’d tracked men into these lairs—some, simple holes in the ground, others, extensive labyrinths built to withstand U.S. bombs—to hunt them like black-footed ferrets hunted prairie dogs back home. His hesitation wasn’t so much due to a fear of dying; he’d faced death many times since arriving in-country nearly two years earlier, during his first tour. But Sergeant Jojola didn’t want to die underground where his soul would be trapped in the dark, away from the open skies and sun.

  Yet, Cop was in there, and so that was where he needed to go, too. What he didn’t know when he plunged into the opening and found himself in a maze of tunnels, dimly lit by the occasional small candle in recesses in the walls, was that in the not-too-distant future Cop would be responsible for the massacre of a village of Hmong whom he and Charlie had befriended. And that one day Cop would kill Charlie.

  In the tunnel he lost his flashlight and gun. In shock, he waited for his enemy to walk up and finish him, but instead he heard the sound of someone staggering away in the dark. I hit him, too, he thought, he’s escaping! He twisted onto his back and tried to rise, but the pain struck him like a lightning bolt and he passed out.

  How many hours he’d lain there he didn’t know. But he woke when someone grabbed him by the shoulders. He tried to reach his knife in its sheath, but a hand restrained him.

  “Goddammit, John, if you stab me I’ll never get your dumb ass out of here,” whispered a voice.

  Charlie Many Horses was probably the only other man in Vietnam who could have tracked him into the hole and through the maze of tunnels. He hauled Jojola, who passed out from the pain twice along the way, out of the lair and then to a rice paddy, where by prearrangement they were met by a helicopter.

  Cop had escaped to continue his guerilla efforts. The villagers would die and so would Charlie. Jojola had sworn to kill Cop, but his second tour of duty had ended with his friends unavenged.

  Jojola’s experience in Vietnam continued to haunt him after he returned to the pu
eblo—impervious even to drowning in alcohol—until he’d learned to accept it and the fact that no matter how fast he ran through the tunnels, or pulled the trigger when the face appeared, they would all die. He would live and try to be a good man, a police officer to serve and protect his people, and a good father to his son, Charlie, named for the long-lost brother.

  And so Cop had lost his power to frighten Jojola. Until recently, when Jojola had a different dream, this one about David Grale.

  Grale said, “It’s a bomb, John Jojola. A dirty bomb. And behold, a pale horse. And the name of him who sat on it was death…. Thus begins the final battle, John, thus begins Armageddon.”

  Then Grale lifted his hand and in the dark a gun flashed. Again Jojola felt the bullet punch into him as he spun and fell. In the darkness, he was grabbed by the shoulders and turned over to find himself looking up into the gentle, sad eyes of Charlie Many Horses, who cradled him on his lap. Sorry, my brother, there is no time to rest. You must return to New York. Find Grale…or all the villagers will die.

  But what will I do if I find him? Jojola asked his dream friend, but Charlie was gone and he lay awake in the dark of his bedroom.

  “There’s no more time,” Jojola told Lucy and Ned as they all left the restaurant and met up with Booger.

  “Hi, ’ucy,” the giant said and hugged her; she was probably the only human being on the planet who would have tolerated the filth.

  “Hi, Booger,” she said. “This is my boyfriend, Ned.”

  “Hi, ’ed.” Booger beamed and stuck out a big greasy paw, which Ned shook trying not to remember that he’d just seen the man picking his nose with it.

  “You know John Jojola,” Lucy said.

  Booger looked at Jojola and nodded his head. “Yes, ’e wants to fin’ Grale.”

  Jojola also shook the extended hand. He wasn’t repulsed by the odd man. In fact, with his huge mane of curly dark hair and beard that covered most of his face, as well as the dark brown eyes and rounded hump of his massive shoulders, Booger reminded him of a buffalo. A good sign, he thought. The buffalo was one of the most sacred animals to Native Americans. Even his people, who had settled in the area at Taos to grow crops a thousand years before the Spanish found them in the sixteenth century, used to ride out on the plains east of their holy mountain to hunt buffalo in the land of the Comanche.