Rise: Luthecker, #2

by Keith Domingue

  The storm drain was perpendicular to the direction the rail line ran, and Winn had to pause in order to remember which way, right or left, led back to the 417. Once he oriented himself, he shined the flashlight beam to his right and was taken aback by the massive underground chamber. Hidden below the city and long abandoned, this concrete tube with fifteen-foot ceilings still held elements of the past—signs pointing to broken turnstiles and nonexistent stairwells, most either removed or fallen to decay. The train tracks that used to carry the cars fifty years earlier—and helped transport thousands of Angelinos—were now barely visible, reduced to sections of steel rails like tracer fire between dirt and debris. Winn’s flashlight beam ran over several items that acted like a time warp—shoes, a hat, a long rotted briefcase, even a commode—tossed aside and covered in rust stains.

  Winn turned his focus to the task at hand, picked up the sledgehammer, strapped it onto his backpack, and began his trek through the rail line and on to the 417.

  “We’re not going to get past that collapsed section,” Chris Aldrich said, wiping sweat off his brow and studying the large sheet of concrete that still blocked the entranceway. He stood next to Yaw who ran the only flashlight they had over the circumference of the sealed-in subway station. His beam settled on the far wall where the refugees lay, looking tired and frightened. Officer Rodriguez was distributing the remaining water.

  “It’s going to be our tomb,” Yaw whispered, only loud enough for Chris to hear.

  A loud thud, something smashing into the wall, froze everyone in their tracks. The impact was quickly followed by the deep thud of another strike from the other side of the wall.

  Yaw traced the source to the graffiti-covered back wall with his flashlight. He watched the concrete move and dust fall from a third hit. Yaw and Chris looked at one another.

  “Winn,” they said at the same time.

  They raced to the far wall just as a sledgehammer blasted through the wall, two concrete cinderblocks falling to the floor.

  A flashlight beam poked through, followed by Winn’s head and torso. He did a quick search of the abandoned chamber before he locked eyes on Chris and Yaw and smiled.

  “Damn, sir, I’m happy to see you.” Yaw began to pull blocks free from the wall.

  20

  Empty Vessel

  David Two-Good examined the small figure he held in his hand. It was stone, black in color, and looked like a large game cat, either a panther or mountain lion. The abdomen of the carving was worn smooth and had a bright sheen to it, contrasting the black-hue, faded to almost grey, at the head and feet of the animal. Two-Good’s fingers instinctively ran over the rough bumps that made up the facial features and detailed paws of the feline creature. The carving was less than five inches long and smooth to the touch. The pleasant feel, no doubt caused by rubbing from countless fingers.

  Two-Good knew from experience that the piece was generations old. He had seen many such statues before. His grandfather, John Stone, had owned several carvings of various animals that were similar to this and had had them on display throughout his home on the Reservation. Stone, leather-faced and in his seventies at the time, had let Two-Good play with the animal figures when he was just a boy, on the rare occasions his mother would let him visit with the superstitious old man. Most of the carvings Two-Good knew of were made from Arizona sandstone and far lighter in color and weight than the one he currently moved between his fingers. The carvings his grandfather collected were known as totems to his people, animal representations of the spirit world, and in Two-Good’s tribe, a totem strikingly similar to the one he held now, that of a mountain lion, was believed by his family to have saved his mother’s life.

  Elaine Two-Feather, mother of two young sons, had been diagnosed with stage four-breast cancer when she was only thirty-eight years old. David, her oldest, was just thirteen at the time. The family lived in a trailer in the Arizona desert located on the outskirts of the Reservation, and as such, they had to drive all the way to the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix when the tribal hospital proved inadequate for her medical needs.

  For as long as he lived, David would never forget the look of devastation on his mother’s face when she received the diagnosis. That look had changed him forever. He had been there when the doctor broke the news, speaking to his mother with rehearsed compassion. David Two-Good could only watch helplessly as the blood, along with the sense of hope that came with life, drained from Elaine Two-Feather’s face, the stark realization of everything she would leave behind hitting her all at once.

  At the time, the diagnosis was considered a death sentence, with a prognosis of less than a year to live; she had been advised to get her affairs in order. It had been just the two of them on this particular trip to the clinic, David’s father long absent from the family, the angry and bitter man tragically passing from an alcohol-related accident when David was just eight years old, and his younger brother, at only eleven years of age, being too young in his mother’s mind to take this journey and face the confirmation of what she had long suspected but had been afraid to face. Elaine Two-Feather had quietly battled her urge to break down and sob during the drive home from the clinic, and the return home had been one of the longest, darkest moments of David Two-Good’s life. When they arrived at their trailer, John Stone, his mother’s father, a man who rarely left his own home, was waiting for them.

  “What are you doing here?” Elaine Two-Good had asked her father, trying to keep the pain from her voice.

  “It’s been chattering…hell, it’s been screaming at me for two days,” David’s grandfather had said, as soon as David helped his mother out of the pickup truck.

  “What’s been screaming, Papa?”

  And that’s when David’s grandfather, the superstitious John Stone, held out the small sandstone carving of a mountain lion.

  “The mountain lion is a protector spirit to our people,” Stone had said, as he gently put it in his daughter’s hand. “And what it’s been screaming for is its new master. You.” Stone had put his hand on his daughter’s cheek a moment before turning to young David. “Your mother is sick. But the mountain lion spirit will protect her. She will face many hard days, and you must be there for her. But this I promise you—she will live for many more years.”

  His grandfather’s words had rattled young David Two-Good that day. There had been a surreal confidence in the old man’s cryptic prediction, and no one beyond David knew of his mother’s symptoms or diagnosis at the time; it was a secret she had made David swear to never tell a soul.

  David had clung hard to the glimmer of hope that his grandfather had given him. And after much pleading from David, which was in part because of the mountain lion totem, and the confidence his grandfather had behind his belief in the totem, Elaine Two-Feather decided to go through with treatment for her cancer. She endured six months of brutal radiation and chemotherapy, with her son David at her side. And, just as his grandfather predicted, just as the mountain lion totem provided, Elaine Two-Feather lived for another twenty-two healthy years.

  Two-Good shook off the memory and turned to Alex. “Where in the hell did you get this?”

  Alex said nothing.

  “Answer the question.”

  Alex looked Two-Good in the eye. “The same place your grandfather did. Do you believe that it was his totem that saved your mother?”

  Two-Good was on his feet. He stormed toward the back of the plane and stood over Alex. “I swear to God; you don’t give me a straight answer, I’ll beat you to death.”

  “No you won’t. Because the one thing you fear more than me, is the man you work for, and that man wants me alive. But that’s not going to stop Lucas Parks from killing you. His actions are born of a deep rage inside him. His rage is similar to the patterns of anger that led you to kill your younger brother.”

  Two Good’s face drained of blood. “How did…?”

  “But unlike you, Lucas Parks embraces his anger,” Alex continued. “He w
on’t try and escape like you did into the military. And Mr. Parks won’t be drunk at the time like you were. His rage is patient, assimilated into his soul from a very young age, and he’ll be calculated, and it will be painful. You’ve seen, first hand, his kind of depravity. And deep inside you know it’s coming. You know it’s going to happen, and soon. And you think you deserve it. You think you deserve it for what you did to your brother.”

  “Fuck you.” Two-Good reached over and picked up the baseball bat. He turned back to Luthecker. “You don’t know shit about me.”

  “Oh, but I do.”

  Rage coursed through Two-Good’s being. He felt his face grow hot, and he raised the baseball bat to strike. “Maybe I should just beat you to death right here then if I’m gonna die so soon.”

  “Do you want to know how he’s going to do it? Do you want an out? From both your sins and your fate?”

  Two-Good paused. He noticed that his hands were shaking.

  “Seng Ge. The snow lion. What you believe about the totem that saved your mother, and the one you just held in your hand, is your truth. In your truth the spirits are universal, and she is a protector spirit. And Seng Ge, she’s come to you, screaming. You know what this means and have since you were a boy. You learned it from your grandfather. Saw it in action with your mother. And that moment has returned again. That’s why I’m here; our meeting is not random. Nothing in the momentum is. And you sense this, deep inside you, that there is reason, there is order, even though you don’t understand it. And you also know, if you betray the spirits, betray the memory of your mother, it will be a fate for you worse than death.”

  “I know all about you, too. You get in people’s heads and you fuck them all up.”

  “I’m not trying to fuck you up. I’m trying to save you. And I can. But it’s not risk free. The knowledge of this risk is the source of discomfort you felt the moment we met. You’re at a crossroads, David Two-Good, son of Elaine Two-Feather.”

  Two-Good’s jaw dropped, and the baseball bat lowered slightly.

  “I’m going to help you. I’m going to tell you what to look for. I’m going to tell you the end result of patterns that were set in motion long before your birth and will continue long after you die. Your mother’s sickness, your father’s anger, your brother’s tragedy, they’re all part of a larger pattern, and once you know, once you see, then and only then will you have the opportunity to become free of the cycle; free of your family’s Karma.”

  Two-Good lowered the bat completely. There was something about Luthecker’s tone that was compelling. The sense of certainty was almost peaceful. It made Two-Good want to know more. “If you’re fucking with me—“

  “You killed your brother in a drunken rage because he stole your woman. He stole your woman because you were your mother’s favorite. You were your mother’s favorite because your father was missing. Your father was missing because he couldn’t provide. Your father’s guilt over the sense of inadequacy, this failure he harbored, combined with a genetic predisposition that led him straight to the bottle. It was inevitable. All of it. And your father passed those traits, that momentum, that Karma, on to you.”

  Tears were streaming down Two-Good’s cheeks. “You don’t know me…” He was reeling.

  Alex continued. “In Lucas Parks you saw strength. Power. And discipline. Things you sorely lacked as a child and that you craved so desperately as a man. When the military rejected you, he embraced you. Lucas Parks became the father figure you never had.”

  “Shut up…” Two-Good whispered.

  “In you, Parks saw a vessel, one that was looking to be emptied of its weakness and restored with something greater. And once emptied, that vessel could be filled with his beliefs, his anger, and his singular purpose. And that vessel could be discarded when it was no longer useful, or worse, when it began to show signs of liability. Which, by the mere fact that you’re with me now, exposed to a potentially dangerous unknown, he is beginning to suspect that is something that you already are. Why else do you think he sent you to retrieve me alone?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Alex knew that this was his opening. His moment to open the door in Two-Good’s mind that would allow his own escape. He leaned forward, closer to Two-Good, and lowered his voice to a whisper as if he were sharing a secret. “There are three things to look for that will happen right before you die. After the third, you will have only minutes to change your fate; to choose between freedom or death brought on by Lucas Parks’ rage.”

  Two-Good sat down in the seat across the aisle from Luthecker without realizing he was doing it.

  “What are you talking about…?”

  “The flow of events, created by choice, that lead to inevitable conclusions. Patterns. The universal collective of the momentum.”

  Alex saw that Two-Good was hanging on his every word.

  “When the airplane lands, we will be separated. You will be invited to an elaborate dinner prepared for both you and Parks. It will be a celebration of sorts for your efforts. Your favorite dish, steak, will be served, along with another favorite, red wine. After your first bottle, Parks will say these words to you, In vino veritas. In wine, there is truth.” It will embarrass you because you’re self-conscious about your drinking in front of him. And then he will ask you about me.

  “That is the first thing to look for; the first potential variable introduced into the algorithm of patterns that defines your life. It will give your emotional state pause as you will hear in those words a sublime message that will barely register, the slightest whisper of a pending threat. Normally, you would dismiss such intuition immediately. But you will not this time.

  “That night, when you go to bed, you will not be able to sleep. You will blame it on the wine and indigestion, but in truth it will be the whisper of that threat, growing louder. Your thoughts will be interrupted as you hear the conversation of two men, speaking in Russian, just outside your window. If you choose to look, and you will, you will see two men in the courtyard below you, smoking cigarettes. They both will have rifles strapped to their shoulders. One will look and see you and smile. You will find that smile ominous. You will find that smile ominous because your intuition is trying to tell you that the threat upon your person is one step closer.

  “That is the second moment you should not dismiss.

  “The very next morning, Parks will come to your room to wake you. He will lead you to a cell that holds the woman that you kidnapped in Los Angeles, Nicole Ellis. It is then that Parks will ask you to kill her.

  “And at this moment you will know, the realization will dawn on you, that the previous two events were, in a way that is just beyond your grasp, sign posts placed in your path, warnings that the momentum of all your choices in life would lead you to this exact moment. And right at this moment the momentum of all the patterns that have made David Two-Good the man he is will be nearly impossible to stop from reaching their conclusion. You will have less than ten minutes to create a different end for yourself. And the longer you wait, the harder and less different the conclusion will be.”

  David Two-Good’s face was frozen in shock.

  Alex continued. “And now the final piece. How it will happen. How you will meet your end. This kill, this murder of an innocent woman, is a test. Of either loyalty to Parks or my level of influence on you. But what Parks does not see, and I do, is that you will not be thinking of him, or me, or the innocent woman about to die, you will be thinking of your mother. You will be remembering her when she was at her most vulnerable, at her closest moment to death from the cancer, and you will remember how helpless her vulnerability made you feel. And how you never wanted to feel that way again. And you will hesitate with Parks’ request. You will hesitate because the one thing that you cannot do is kill a weakened and helpless woman. It is a line you cannot cross, and Parks knows it, in the deepest recesses of his mind, and it will enrage him. It will enrage him because he views it as weak,
and therefore he sees you as weak. He always has. And he will kill you, without hesitation, in front of her. Parks will do this to show her what strength is. And he will also wish to see the look of terror on her face. Something you’ve seen him do before. And he does this, knowing all along, that it will lead back to me. It’s his plan. It’s how you fit into it. The question is, are you strong enough to interrupt the patterns set in motion? Are you strong enough to change?”

  Two-Good slowly got to his feet. Alex could see the large Native American was traumatized and trying to process the information Alex had just shared with him.

  “Just…stay seated. Don’t move. Don’t say another word,” Two-Good stammered, before he turned away and took his own seat at the front of the plane. Alex watched as Two-Good reeled. His words had shaken the Native American to the core. He noticed that Two-Good, unaware of the action, held the small stone snow lion tightly in his hand.

  The seeds have been planted, Alex thought. Although to what end, he was unsure. The details that he had just shared with David Two-Good were extremely risky, and he may have inadvertently put Nikki’s life into play. In all his experience reading the fate of others, Alex had never extrapolated exact events in such detail with intent to manipulate both the narrative and the outcome as he had just done with Two-Good. But Alex had little in the way of time and options. And now everything, all the patterns surrounding David Two-Good’s destiny were completely scrambled, and Alex was unsure as to what he had just done. Had he predicted the pattern of events leading to Two-Good’s death, or had he created them? Had he changed the man’s future by simply sharing it with him? For sure, those patterns had been interrupted. In fact, they no longer existed. The choice Two-Good would face to kill a woman— more than likely Nikki—had been clear as day to Alex. The choice would be the defining moment of Two-Good’s life. But had Alex saved her in the process? Or had he condemned her to death? Nikki’s fate had long since been beyond his perceptive grasp. He could not say for sure what would happen to her at any given time or under any given circumstance. Her fate had been lost to him the moment he changed it, the moment he changed her, by stepping into the momentum and saving her life. Did his words and influence now endanger it? The only thing Alex knew for sure right now was that he still saw complete darkness in Two-Good’s immediate future. To Alex, darkness meant no patterns to follow, and no patterns to follow meant no more life. The momentum of Two-Good’s choices would be unstoppable—the Native American would die very soon, and nothing Alex nor Two-Good himself did could stop it. Alex’s only hope was that Two-Good would choose a more meaningful death than the ones his previous, uninterrupted patterns of behavior permitted. The more important question to Alex right now was Nikki’s fate, not to mention his own. Many thoughts ran through his mind, many options. Perhaps he had never saved Nikki. Perhaps, in the end, nothing could be stopped, he began to fear. Nothing could be changed, only delayed. Alex thought back to his conversation with Kunchin in the Dharma King Cave in Tibet and the old monk’s words about Karma. He said that Alex would lose someone he loved and would be unable to stop it this time. He began to doubt whether or not change was truly possible. Perhaps it was an enormous karmic debt that Alex created that was now being called in.