The Parker Trilogy

by Tony Faggioli

  Hector shook his head, slowly at first, and then firmly.

  Good, The Gray Man replied with a small smile. Now. I’ve asked others to help me shield this room, for a short time, so I can provide you with some training. Are you ready, son, to finally grab a hold of your destiny?

  Hector looked at The Gray Man and for the first time in as long as he could remember, there was no hesitation in what he wanted to do with his life. “Yes,” he said. “I am.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Melon heard the plan and didn’t even hesitate. He was down. As they drove into downtown Cabo San Lucas, Parker was relieved but also a tad concerned. It had been a bit too easy to get him on board, to be honest, as if Melon were spoiling for a fight. And this made Parker wonder just how well, despite the talk of sweet senoritas and fishing charters, his buddy was adjusting to civilian life after all.

  In the distance, sitting in the ocean like an old statue, was what Melon had called El Arco, a huge, arch-shaped rock formation that sat where the Pacific Ocean became the Gulf of California. The ocean was a dazzling dark blue and picturesque beneath the clear, light blue sky. Parker had nearly forgotten what the sky looked like with all the rain and dreariness of LA the past two weeks. The seagulls that were flying ahead of them down the road now sped off to join a huge flock that had gathered at a dock in the distance, where a charter boat had pulled in and fish grizzle was being tossed over the side. It was a feeding frenzy of seabirds, with their white and gray feathers, gliding, diving, crisscrossing and even colliding at times, all to get a bite.

  They arrived downtown and parked. Melon opened the back of his jeep and unzipped a black duffel bag. “I packed light for now. For what you’ve got planned we’ll have to swing by my house. I’ve got a few gun lockers in the basement that’ll have more than enough of what we need.”

  “Got it,” Parker said, as Melon handed him a 9 mm Czechoslovakian-made CZ-75 that made Parker grin widely. “No way.”

  “Your favorite, right?”

  “Yeah. Broke my heart when I found out it wasn’t on the approved firearm list for the LAPD. Still got mine at home, though.”

  “That gun saved your ass a few times, right?”

  “No doubt.”

  “Figured you might appreciate having one down here,” Melon added, slapping Parker on the back before he tucked a Colt .45 into the belt of his shorts and pulled his t-shirt over it. It wasn’t disguised as well as Parker’s, which was covered by his Puma sweat jacket, but Parker wearing a jacket in paradise made him equally conspicuous. But neither one of them was going to be left vulnerable. After locking up the jeep, they walked a half block down Morelos Street to Lázaro Cárdenas, where they entered Señor Nachos, the restaurant Clopton had told Parker to go to.

  Across the street was El Squid Roe, which Melon said was a hard-core party bar for the college crowd. It was pretty much empty save for a few folks sipping Bloody Marys to conquer their hangovers.

  “Now what?” Melon asked.

  “We go in and order lobster tacos, which they don’t have on the menu. That’s the cue, I guess.”

  Melon smiled. “The name is Bond. Melon Bond.”

  Parker laughed. “More like, Douche. Melon Douche.”

  When they entered the restaurant more than a few people took notice. They weren’t young, but they were both big and fit. A waitress, leaning against the counter next to the food station, gave Parker a smile. He looked her off and caught the eye of a passing waiter with slick black hair and dark skin. “You can sit anywhere,” he said, as he hurried off with two armfuls of plates towards a table full of raucous people.

  Training was instinct, instinct was training. They both automatically went to a table that gave Parker a clear view of the entrance and Melon a clear view of the emergency exit. Parker wasn’t the least bit worried about Clopton being dirty, but that didn’t mean her contact down here hadn’t been flipped, or worse, been discovered, killed and replaced with someone who was going to show up with a crew of men with murderous intent. After all, they were, once again, in enemy territory. Except this one was owned by drug cartels dealing mostly in cocaine instead of terrorist cells dealing mostly in poppies for heroine.

  The waitress who had tried to flirt with Parker came over. Evidently determined to make a second run at him, she stood so close that her hip touched his shoulder as she asked if they wanted any drinks. Before Parker could say anything, Melon ordered them two Modelos. She scurried off before Parker could make the order and he raised his eyebrows at Melon.

  “What?” Melon said. “One beer helps the aim, man. And . . .” He looked around carefully. “I need a few more minutes to size this place up before you say the magic words.”

  Parker nodded and looked out the window, which was open to the outside, a roll-up door recessed into the ceiling. Outside, a few couples rode by on bikes, touristy types, laughing and joking. A group of three Mexican girls, maybe thirteen or fourteen, had gathered on the opposite corner, their hair too made up for this time of day.

  “Hookers,” Melon said, evidently having followed Parker’s gaze.

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Nope,” Melon answered, a chagrined look on his face.

  “Please tell me you haven’t—”

  “Nah, man. C’mon. They’re children. I have a hard enough time—” Melon began, but then he stopped himself cold.

  Parker was gonna press, but he knew better. Whiskey Dick was bad enough, but War Dick was even worse. It wasn’t manly to live with it, much less to discuss it. But like it or not, they were still only human. Be it the depression or constant lack of sleep, things didn’t always work the way they used to. It had taken Parker almost a year to get back to normal after he’d returned home, and even now he sometimes worried that he’d let Trudy down if he or she picked the wrong night to make amorous advances.

  “It happens, dude. To us all,” Parker said, without looking at him.

  Having finished his scan of the room and evidently finding no danger, Melon leaned back in his chair. Digging a finger into a crack in the table, he gave a defeated sort of nod. “That damn place,” he said with barely a whisper.

  “Yeah,” Parker said.

  “How’d you do it, man?”

  “Do what?”

  “Come back from that chaos and become a damn cop, of all things?”

  Parker pursed his lips and thought about it for a second. “I dunno. It wasn’t easy at first, I’ll tell ya that.”

  “No?”

  “Shit, no. The hardest part was that first year on street patrol, not seeing a threat around every corner.”

  “Yeah. Makes sense. You weren’t in country anymore but . . .”

  “But that didn’t matter. My body wasn’t in country anymore, man. But my mind? My mind was one thought, one memory, one blink of an eye away from that place.”

  “And now?”

  “Not as much, but still . . . not as seldom as I’d like.”

  Melon nodded and looked out over the bay, a scar along his jawline oddly delineating his face in the sunshine. “Mm-hm. Same here, if that helps. I can be out there, miles off the coast, with the tuna finally biting after days of nothing, totally at peace—like I was telling you—and it’ll hit me. It might be the rotors from one of the tourist helicopters in the sky, sounding nothing like a Blackhawk but then again just enough like one from that far away to take me back. More often, though? It’s the blood on deck from a fresh catch or the way a tuna fights when you finally gaffe them and get them on deck. Just gasping for air. Gulps of it. Like . . . you know.” He paused and took a deep breath. “How ’bout you?”

  “Before, it was coming up on a group of bangers—I started in South Central LA—and it didn’t matter that they were black, wearing red or blue hoodies and looking nothing like any grunt in Al Qaeda or the Taliban. I perceived them as deadly threats from the minute I pulled up in my patrol car. They might just be sitting around and bouncing a basketball back
and forth, but to me? One or all of them had to have a gun and they had to be wanting to use it on me at that second, you know what I mean? The assumption that they were up to no good was maybe reasonable, but the assumption that they all had murder on their minds? It was irrational.”

  “Irrational?” Melon said with a chuckle. “What’s that?”

  “Exactly.”

  The waitress came back with their beers and gave Parker a third smile, proving that she was the thirstiest one of them all.

  The smile disappeared when he ordered the lobster tacos. Her face went hard as stone and her hand froze over her notepad, the pen poised in mid-air, before she wrote nothing and said, “Yes, gentleman. We’ll get those ordered right up.” She fled to the waiter they’d seen earlier, who was at the counter filling salsa bottles, and whispered to him. He looked up surprised, then came over to them.

  “Gentleman, I just wanted to let you know that it’s going to take about twenty minutes for your order. Is that okay?”

  Melon took a swig of his beer and gave him a wink. “No problem.”

  When he walked away Parker looked at Melon and said, “Never, ever, did James Bond wink so obviously at a contact like that.”

  “I know,” Melon said with a shrug. “The damn Brits always were far more sophisticated than us.”

  “So, why’d you do it?” Parker asked.

  “Because I wanted to make a personal kinda connection with him. Just so he’d know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That he’d be the first one I shoot in the face if he sends the wrong people here.”

  The light was poor in the direction Luisa was facing, so Eenie was ordered to rotate the chair she was in. This allowed Maggie to get a glimpse of her face. She was still sound asleep, despite all the chatter and commotion. Something in what they’d forced her to drink had probably knocked her out. They hadn’t eaten since they’d been moved from the shack, which meant that whatever was in that concoction had mostly hit an empty stomach, no doubt heightening the effects. Well. It’s not actually an empty stomach, is it? And this thought only made it worse. Maggie worried about the baby. Luisa was still in her first trimester, the time when she was most vulnerable to miscarriage.

  With the heavy drapes drawn in the outer room, it was hard to get a fix on the time, whether it was day or night. The flames on the candles of the display altar flickered against wicks of unequal length, some tall, some barely stubs of fire, the newer wax dribbles of the candles running over or alongside the old.

  “Why?” Maggie muttered, getting to her knees. “Why are you all doing this?”

  “Shut up!” Güero shouted.

  But Delva looked at her with a cruel fascination. “Do you think that your God is the only one that gives blessings, child?” Her eyes narrowed. “Because he’s not. Mine does, too.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Güero said, his voice full of impatience.

  “No. We don’t. But the trucks are here. And the potion is doing its work on the fetus. We’re almost there. Get things prepared,” Delva said, waving her hand at the stone block in the room without taking her eyes off Maggie, “while I enlighten this pretty little creature.”

  “Ah! What for?” Güero scoffed.

  “Because she’s going to die today, and it’s always best when something knows ahead of time that it’s going to die. Be it a girl or chicken. The eyes . . . they go wider in the end. It heightens the fear and thickens the blood, too, like syrup.” Her gaze was just as perverse as Güero’s, but in a different way entirely. “And that kind of blood, mijo? It tastes much better. Goes down like a fine wine, actually.”

  “You’re all sick,” Maggie said. “Sick and crazy.”

  Delva’s smile ominously thinned before she broke into a churlish giggle. “And what, exactly, is wrong with being sick and crazy?” she purred. “Anyway. As I was saying. We are blessed too, by our Master.”

  Güero was pulling ropes across the stone block. “Seriously? Blessed, my ass. This whole thing has been total chaos since I left LA”

  “Yes. And that is where The Master does his best work: in chaos, mijo. Because chaos is subterfuge. It provides cover for the darker dealings until . . . Why, look at her Güero,” Delva said, walking over to Maggie and lifting up her chin. “All you could see was her sex. But no. She is a touched one. Touched, I say. Oh. You have no idea the power we can gain from her in the end.”

  “The end?” Maggie said, scared now, but nudging her to continue.

  “Yes. The others we have brought here have been for this task or that. To protect our interests or the interests of our friends.”

  Maggie’s shock was immediate. The others?

  Just then, Güero opened a trap door over the stone block. The natural light that spilled in momentarily blinded her before it lit the stone block up in full detail, finally revealing a sacrificial altar made of carved stone. Smooth on the top, it stood about four feet off the ground and was more like a curved table than an altar. At each corner, wooden posts had been inserted into the stone. To each post was tied a length of thick rope. Along its side, in sections, were Aztec-like markings, some painted in bright red and green, others carved into the stone.

  How many people have died looking up at that trapdoor? Maggie wondered before Delva interrupted her thoughts.

  “You see, blood is life. It gives it and it takes it. Sometimes, like tomorrow morning, it has to be taken in order to be given.”

  “Tomorrow morning?” Güero said. “I thought we were doing this tonight! Why do we have to wait?”

  Delva waved both hands at him with frustration. “Because, you idiot! The timing was ruined when the dumb little bitch destroyed the first batch of potion. Now that it’s in her, we will resume with the rest of the process. First? We paint the girl. Then? We paint the altar. Once the girl’s body is finally ready? Then we bring in the animals—”

  Maggie’s heart sunk. Animals? Oh, God.

  “—then the wrathful things. They come next.”

  Wrathful things?

  “After that, it’ll be like a wicked play!” Another giggle, but this one laced with glee. “You’ll see. The breach will happen, and everyone will play their part. And then?” Delva’s face was covered in moles and deep scars, some of them so wide that they looked like nail scratches. She bunched them all up now in a sickeningly layered grin. “Then we take the baby, and right at that moment, at that second”—she lifted Maggie’s chin painfully high, exposing her neck—“we cut this one’s throat and fill that bowl over there with her blood.”

  Maggie’s eyes followed Delva’s. In a carved recess of the altar there was a large wooden bowl.

  “Why? I mean, you said it would heighten the effects on the child. But why?” Güero asked curiously, stepping back and looking at the bowl as well.

  “Why?” Delva said, as if it were the stupidest question anyone had asked her in her life. “Because it’ll be for the baptism, of course.”

  “Baptism?”

  “Yes, mijo. This is how we’ve been blessed. Before? It would’ve been a baptism of just normal blood. But to do the ritual with the blood of a touched one? Ah. You’ll see. The baby from this womb will be an agent of hell of the highest order.” Delva cackled.

  As Maggie looked into her eyes, she realized that Delva, contrary to appearances, was not raving mad. She was cunning. She was the smallest and weakest looking of the bunch, but she was by far and away the most dangerous. Because in her—through her—something evil emanated. Something that was just using her as a shell. It was a notion that Maggie was completely uncomfortable with. Hell. The devil. You couldn’t just believe they existed without believing they were also at work, each day, in the world. Could you?

  Because, deny it all she wanted, Maggie knew evil. She knew it . . . intimately. She had made its acquaintance both as a child and as a grown woman. Maybe that’s why she’d been so eager to reject things earlier, when she’d dismissed all their voodoo like
silly Halloween beliefs.

  But she knew those eyes that were looking at her. They were familiar . . . Somehow, they were . . . “No!” she whispered in terror, her eyes going wide with recognition.

  “He still watches you, you know?” Delva said. The smile drained from her face and was replaced with a look of complete, overwhelming and utter contempt.

  “No. Shut up!” Maggie said, closing her eyes against his. Because Delva’s eyes were his eyes now, she could feel it. That’s impossible. Insane! But they were.

  Delva chuckled. Then, leaning over to Maggie’s ear, she whispered, “What was his name again, sweetie?”

  NO!

  “Michael. Yes. That’s it. Michael. Part of his agony is in being forced to watch you, all the way from hell. Isn’t that . . . sweet?”

  Maggie’s lower lip trembled, and despite her best efforts, a single tear escaped her left eye.

  She cringed as Delva leaned in and licked it off her cheek with a leathery tongue.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Father Soltera took two large steps backwards. My God, what—

  But the question was barely out of his mouth before it was answered. Off to their right, first one, then two, then five trees toppled sideways, gashing through tree branches nearby with sharp cracks and brittle explosions.

  Coming through the forest was a creature beyond the grasp of even his worst nightmares. About twenty feet tall, it was a blended mix of cracked wood and flesh. Seemingly without knee joints, it stepped stiffly and quickly across the forest floor. Everything obstructing its path was simply pushed aside, as if a force field of some kind was moving out ahead of it. It had a barrel chest that led up to a pair of featherless wings, reduced to bone and tendon. Spread wide, they had sharp tips. Its thick neck was curved bone, covered in thorns at least four feet long. Its head was all skull, its mouth agape and its eyes hollowed-out holes. From the top of its head, on the left side, protruded a horn that bent downward towards the ground. The horn on the right side appeared to have been snapped off and what was left of it was merely a jagged stub.