Chapter 30
65,000,000,000 had come and gone before us and roughly 10,000,000 of them loitered between our world and the other side. And he was on his way to communicate with them.
He was using the rarest and least known map in all of human history. It was also the most invaluable. It wasn’t a map drawn on papyrus or paper by professional cartographers. It wasn’t one that mapped out capes, panhandles, islands, peninsulas and the like. You couldn’t get to any place on this invaluable piece of cartography by plane, ship or car. What was charted on it was not defensible by land, sea or air. There were no national boundaries or even countries.
Nonetheless it was a map that would lead any navigator brave or foolhardy enough to be led by it to the vastest, most potent yet least controllable force in all the humanly recognized dimensions, a realm far more powerful than even the greatest terrestrial empires. Essentially, it was a map of the entire underworld, one that led those who could follow it to the temporary yet eternal realm of the displaced dead, those who went neither to what was really heaven, hell or purgatory. Theologians had called it limbo.
It was first charted by a 14th century Transylvanian mystic and monk, the Rasputin of his time. The Venerable Balascu’s map, roughly translated as “Charon’s Way” by those extremely select few who’d known about it, detailed the vast, virtually limitless No Man’s Land that served as the place of endless transition between the living and the dead. Culled through decades of meditation and so-called out-of-body experiences, Brother Balascu was revered by those extremely select few who’d studied his work for being the only living man to freely roam between the realms of the living and the dead.
Milo Dragović knew that he didn’t have much time. Dietrich somehow had managed to keep a tether on him linking him to the Hole. Time essentially was meaningless here but back on earth it was still something that could be measured in nanoseconds and he knew he didn’t have much time to waste.
The map was actually a series of incantations penned by Belascu that opened seemingly endless portals. The forever-displaced dead were able to navigate their way without the spells as if guided by some preternatural instinct or guidance from a higher power but Dragović, for undefined reasons, needed the map. In lieu of landmarks, each opened portal let know whoever was being guided by Charon’s Way that they were indeed still on the right path. It was actually surprisingly reminiscent of Dante’s depiction of the netherworld in his Divine Comedy. Only instead of nine circles, there were dozens of realms alternately filled with light or darkness, forests or wastelands, unearthly necropolises, and some resembling classical renditions of both heaven and hell.
The map was implanted into Dragović’s ruined head by none other than Belascu himself, one of Dietrich’s earliest acquisitions. What Belascu had seen 700 years ago Dragović was now seeing and in exactly the right sequence. When word spread throughout Transylvania and beyond about his supernatural sojourns, he was burned at the stake as a heretic.
The dead dictator was now in a realm that was the strangest one, yet, a bleak and dark world or dimension in which the denizens were petrified and rooted to the ground, some of them resembling small trees. Dragović could feel the eyes following him as he looked around and muttered the last incantation that would lead him to the largest realm of all, the only one that served as a common area for all of the ten million trapped souls.
The dead dictator knew that not all of them would be converted. Yet out of ten million, he knew he could summon for Dietrich an army of the undead that could easily accomplish his goals. He briefly wondered if he would see Irina here or if she would be able to seek him out and find him. He hoped against hope as he passed through the final portal.
The brightest light he’d ever seen overtook him as he finished the last syllable of the spell. Even though he no longer had eyes in the biological sense, it overwhelmed him and he wondered if this was the bright white light he’d heard others speaking of after near death experiences. After his sight had adjusted he was greeted with a scene that was astounding.
It was astounding to him because he stood atop a mountain looking down at a valley that was very terrestrial, familiar, even. On either side of the valley, mountains in the distance higher than any in the Urals dissolved in gauzy light. He began walking down even though his ruined ankle that was shattered by a bullet in 1991 made any ambulation difficult. He could see streaks of light far below him flitting back and forth like fireflies in a manner very similar to the manifestations of his cellmates back in the dreaded Hole.
There was no sun or discernible source of light yet everything was brightly illuminated as if Dragović was seeing in all light spectrums. While the mountain was a muted gold color, the landscape below him was bone white. That’s why he didn’t see the Bridge of Bone mentioned by Belascu until he got down to the foothills. It was a bridge that spanned no river and made no apparent sense. Dragović then saw a luminescent figure coalesce into a vaguely humanoid shape that quickly moved across the bridge. Since time didn’t exist here, they met in the middle sooner than he expected.
It was a wizened man, kindly in aspect, and he wore a hood over his head. While he was ancient, his face bore no wrinkles or bags under the eyes. Dragović looked at his feet and the skulls that made up various parts of the bridge smiled up at him.
“This place looks oddly familiar. It reminds me of some parts of my native country.”
“What you see is not what I see, save for this symbolic bridge. As with everything when we were alive on earth, it is subject to interpretation. This common realm looks differently to everyone else.”
“What does it look like to you and what is this bridge supposed to symbolize?”
“It is a bridge for the dead that reaches back from whence we all came. Those who live here in what some have called limbo are free to go back using this bridge. Yet it is a bridge without a shore. They find when they go back that there is nothing awaiting them. Hardly anyone can see or hear them. The world of substance passes through their flesh. And very few of the living are gifted enough to communicate with us. Yet despite constant failure, some never come back. They refuse to move on.” Move on to what? Dragović asked himself as he looked around at the bleakness. The hooded figure inclined his head in curiosity, which was in itself a curiously durable human trait.
“Who are you? And how did you get here?” They spoke no earthly dialect. While conversing in neither Milo’s native Slavic tongue, Russian or any manmade language, they nonetheless understood each other perfectly.
“Milo Dragović,” he proudly said and expected the man to expect him. He did.
“Ah. It took you long enough to get here. It takes most of us much sooner. Did you need Belascu’s map?”
Dragović touched his ruined head at the temple.
“I see you have not come alone.”
Dragović wondered what he was talking about then assumed that he could see the tether of energy that kept him connected to that damned chamber of Dietrich’s.
“Which side will you inhabit?” the wizened man asked, gesturing to one end of the bone bridge then the other. Dragović looked at both sides of the bleached, bone-white landscape and they looked identical.
“Neither. I haven’t much time. I have to speak with everyone here.”
“To what end?”
“Freedom and vindication.”
The ancient figure smiled, pulled back his hood and finally revealed some laugh lines around his toothless mouth and elsewhere on his eyeless face, another curious relic of his former humanity.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
The Bone Bridge: Chapter 29
Chapter 29
“So, do you like it here, Honey?” Adam looked up from the television and at Virginia.
“Yeah. You have a really cool place here. And you have some awesome dogs.” He stopped and frowned. “We don’t have any dogs at home. My Mom’s afraid of them.”
“That’s a shame. Dogs make for the most awesome people.” Adam nodded in agreement. “Sweetie, I need you to tell me what you see, what exactly happened to you after you woke up from your coma.”
“Your brother told you?”
“Of course. He told me everything. After all, there was a reason why he brought you to me.”
“And what’s that?”
“I have… certain abilities, too. Whereas most people with abilities can do just one thing or the other, I have several abilities.”
“Like what?”
“Like seeing auras, feeling the presence of paranormal entities, foretelling the future, even mentally communicating with them. You have to understand, Adam,” Virginia said as she steepled her fingers, “my brother Eddie was never a big believer in people with psychic abilities. At least, not until after Chaz passed away. So for him to turn around in the Carolinas and to bring you here to me took a huge leap of faith for him. So I need to know every detail of what’s going on in your life because…”
“Because what?”
“I’m sensing that you and my brother didn’t arrive here alone.”
“You’re right about that.” Still, the teenager looked at her skeptically. “What are you sensing?”
“A… an imposter. Someone pretending to be what they’re not. But I can’t tell more until I channel your energy through me.” She took his hands in hers and relished how they felt even as she closed her eyes and concentrated. They were warm and softer than kid leather. Even though he wasn’t instructed to, Adam closed his eyes, too.
“I sense at least three others are with you but they’re not aware of each other. One’s pretending to be someone who was dear to you.”
“Not was. Is. She was my girlfriend. She died on Halloween night.”
“I feel your sadness over that loss, your pain. But this… this Other. Not only is she not your loved one, she’s not even a paranormal entity.”
“What?” Adam said as his big green eyes flew open. “Are you serious? She’s not even a ghost?”
“No. The other two are. But not this imposter. But she now knows you’re on to her. We need to tell her in no uncertain terms that we know who she is and what she’s up to.”
“What is her name?”
“She’s a psychic named Matilda or something like that. And she’s close by. In fact, she may even know exactly where you are right now.”
Mathilda abruptly broke from the connection and quickly put her back against the wall of her dorm room. It wasn’t the optimal way to sever a connection and to reenter her body any more than merely hitting the power button is the best way to shut down a computer. But they were on to her, Adam and the old lady were, and she had to get out. “Fuck me,” she said in her Australian accent.
When she was picking the kid’s brain, she came across the perfect person over whom to superimpose her out-of-body presence. This Adam Moss kid had just lost someone near and dear to him and it didn’t take Mathilda long to find out about this Clarissa including every detail of her face and body that she’d downloaded from the kid’s mind.
They called her a “wet hacker”, a name she hated. Projecting an astral image and getting deeply into someone’s mind while in an out-of-body state was her specialty. Needing only a picture of her subject and an approximate location, she was more reliable than any bloodhound. A.D.E.P.T. had actively recruited her back when she was still a gangly girl of 10 but Oliver Blood and the American government had helped her focus, refine and strengthen her paranormal abilities to the point where she was a trusted covert field agent. The agency employed five other adepts like her but as far as she or anyone else knew, she was the only one of her kind.
She was angry with Adam for distrusting her but Mathilda knew she only had herself to blame. Rushed into service, she didn’t have much time to delve deeply enough into his mind to get a sense of this Clarissa’s personality to be able to mimic more than just her looks. And she sensed that Adam must’ve picked up on the lascivious looks she was directing at him. But she couldn’t help it. He was a looker and his libido was at least the equal of her own and that was saying a lot considering that Mathilda Hogan spent at least 10 hours a day thinking about sex.
But even if the kid and the old lady now were on to her, at least she got to hang around long enough to get an approximate fix on his location. She reached for her cell phone and thumbed in a number.
“Ollie? I got him. Coffey’s stashed him somewhere in Vienna, Virginia. And he has another adept helping him out.”
“Meet us at headquarters and call the other adepts. We’re gonna need all hands on deck for this one.” Blood put his cell phone back in his pocket. “The girl’s a horny little pain in the ass but I gotta admit, she’s good.”
“Was that Mathilda?”
“Yeah, and she backed up what this little doohickey here’s tellin’ us.” And Blood held up the tracking device giving them the location of the transponder that Elle had put under her brother’s skateboard. “They’re in Vienna, Virginia. They’re onto us and they have help.”
They were already on their way there and were about two hours out.
“Checkmate,” Jodl told Hans Dietrich in their native language. The living German looked again at the chessboard and realized the dead German was right. Dietrich knocked over his pieces.
He wondered if Jodl had yet seen the irony. As an officer in a concentration camp, he must have used the services of imprisoned Jews who were given free run of the compound, those who had special gifts or abilities and were used in much the same way as certain modern-day prisoners are given trustee status.
Jodl was the only trustee of his kind in the whole world. He was a captured spirit who had long since proven his trustworthiness because he had proven loyal to Dietrich’s cause. Whereas the other entities were kept in the Hole and on a leash of energy that prevented them from slipping away, Dietrich had grown to trust Jodl so much he knew he could send him out like a murderous homing pigeon and that he’d come back to roost every time.
So it was on Halloween night and again after the bloodbath at the Christianson house. Jodl was one of the very few multigifted entities in Dietrich’s ghostly army. He could summon at will razor-sharp weapons, fly, materialize through solid objects, interact with the physical world and find whomever he wanted anywhere in the world. Dietrich wondered if the sick fuck even knew how to teleport, he was so fast.
“Something has to be done about the Moss boy. The Christiansons were supposed to be a warning. Apparently, it did not work since the boy is in ADEPT’s custody.”
“Are you suggesting what I think you are, Herr Dietrich?” He smiled literally from ear to ear, another creepy gift of his. He had the ability to warp, deform or change his appearance at will while still often giving the uninitiated the appearance of being a living, solid human being.
“I am afraid so. It’s a shame. He could have been of so much help to us and I wouldn’t have to deal with that fat fuck in there,” he said, motioning to the Hole.
Jodl nodded. He knew Dietrich was talking about Dragović. Perhaps it was best that Jodl was trusted enough to live outside the Hole. The old Nazi was sure he would’ve eviscerated the old Communist the same way he did those twin girls back in Massachusetts. It wouldn’t have killed him any more than it would’ve killed the twins (there’s only one way to kill a ghost and mutilation is certainly not the way). But he would’ve given him more exquisite agony than even the energy field disruptor that Dietrich loved to use on the cantankerous.
“When do you want it done, Herr Dietrich?”
“Tonight. I want it to be over with. We cannot take a chance of him developing into what I suspect.”
“And that is?”
“Our worst nightmare. Go.”
The room containing the Hole immediately got warmer when Jodl disappeared through the steel door and Dietrich unzipped his leather trench coat. He looked at the Hole’s round window and wondered how Dragović was faring in his massive recruitment drive. Dietrich had done his part. Now it was up to Dragović to do his.
“So, do you like it here, Honey?” Adam looked up from the television and at Virginia.
“Yeah. You have a really cool place here. And you have some awesome dogs.” He stopped and frowned. “We don’t have any dogs at home. My Mom’s afraid of them.”
“That’s a shame. Dogs make for the most awesome people.” Adam nodded in agreement. “Sweetie, I need you to tell me what you see, what exactly happened to you after you woke up from your coma.”
“Your brother told you?”
“Of course. He told me everything. After all, there was a reason why he brought you to me.”
“And what’s that?”
“I have… certain abilities, too. Whereas most people with abilities can do just one thing or the other, I have several abilities.”
“Like what?”
“Like seeing auras, feeling the presence of paranormal entities, foretelling the future, even mentally communicating with them. You have to understand, Adam,” Virginia said as she steepled her fingers, “my brother Eddie was never a big believer in people with psychic abilities. At least, not until after Chaz passed away. So for him to turn around in the Carolinas and to bring you here to me took a huge leap of faith for him. So I need to know every detail of what’s going on in your life because…”
“Because what?”
“I’m sensing that you and my brother didn’t arrive here alone.”
“You’re right about that.” Still, the teenager looked at her skeptically. “What are you sensing?”
“A… an imposter. Someone pretending to be what they’re not. But I can’t tell more until I channel your energy through me.” She took his hands in hers and relished how they felt even as she closed her eyes and concentrated. They were warm and softer than kid leather. Even though he wasn’t instructed to, Adam closed his eyes, too.
“I sense at least three others are with you but they’re not aware of each other. One’s pretending to be someone who was dear to you.”
“Not was. Is. She was my girlfriend. She died on Halloween night.”
“I feel your sadness over that loss, your pain. But this… this Other. Not only is she not your loved one, she’s not even a paranormal entity.”
“What?” Adam said as his big green eyes flew open. “Are you serious? She’s not even a ghost?”
“No. The other two are. But not this imposter. But she now knows you’re on to her. We need to tell her in no uncertain terms that we know who she is and what she’s up to.”
“What is her name?”
“She’s a psychic named Matilda or something like that. And she’s close by. In fact, she may even know exactly where you are right now.”
Mathilda abruptly broke from the connection and quickly put her back against the wall of her dorm room. It wasn’t the optimal way to sever a connection and to reenter her body any more than merely hitting the power button is the best way to shut down a computer. But they were on to her, Adam and the old lady were, and she had to get out. “Fuck me,” she said in her Australian accent.
When she was picking the kid’s brain, she came across the perfect person over whom to superimpose her out-of-body presence. This Adam Moss kid had just lost someone near and dear to him and it didn’t take Mathilda long to find out about this Clarissa including every detail of her face and body that she’d downloaded from the kid’s mind.
They called her a “wet hacker”, a name she hated. Projecting an astral image and getting deeply into someone’s mind while in an out-of-body state was her specialty. Needing only a picture of her subject and an approximate location, she was more reliable than any bloodhound. A.D.E.P.T. had actively recruited her back when she was still a gangly girl of 10 but Oliver Blood and the American government had helped her focus, refine and strengthen her paranormal abilities to the point where she was a trusted covert field agent. The agency employed five other adepts like her but as far as she or anyone else knew, she was the only one of her kind.
She was angry with Adam for distrusting her but Mathilda knew she only had herself to blame. Rushed into service, she didn’t have much time to delve deeply enough into his mind to get a sense of this Clarissa’s personality to be able to mimic more than just her looks. And she sensed that Adam must’ve picked up on the lascivious looks she was directing at him. But she couldn’t help it. He was a looker and his libido was at least the equal of her own and that was saying a lot considering that Mathilda Hogan spent at least 10 hours a day thinking about sex.
But even if the kid and the old lady now were on to her, at least she got to hang around long enough to get an approximate fix on his location. She reached for her cell phone and thumbed in a number.
“Ollie? I got him. Coffey’s stashed him somewhere in Vienna, Virginia. And he has another adept helping him out.”
“Meet us at headquarters and call the other adepts. We’re gonna need all hands on deck for this one.” Blood put his cell phone back in his pocket. “The girl’s a horny little pain in the ass but I gotta admit, she’s good.”
“Was that Mathilda?”
“Yeah, and she backed up what this little doohickey here’s tellin’ us.” And Blood held up the tracking device giving them the location of the transponder that Elle had put under her brother’s skateboard. “They’re in Vienna, Virginia. They’re onto us and they have help.”
They were already on their way there and were about two hours out.
“Checkmate,” Jodl told Hans Dietrich in their native language. The living German looked again at the chessboard and realized the dead German was right. Dietrich knocked over his pieces.
He wondered if Jodl had yet seen the irony. As an officer in a concentration camp, he must have used the services of imprisoned Jews who were given free run of the compound, those who had special gifts or abilities and were used in much the same way as certain modern-day prisoners are given trustee status.
Jodl was the only trustee of his kind in the whole world. He was a captured spirit who had long since proven his trustworthiness because he had proven loyal to Dietrich’s cause. Whereas the other entities were kept in the Hole and on a leash of energy that prevented them from slipping away, Dietrich had grown to trust Jodl so much he knew he could send him out like a murderous homing pigeon and that he’d come back to roost every time.
So it was on Halloween night and again after the bloodbath at the Christianson house. Jodl was one of the very few multigifted entities in Dietrich’s ghostly army. He could summon at will razor-sharp weapons, fly, materialize through solid objects, interact with the physical world and find whomever he wanted anywhere in the world. Dietrich wondered if the sick fuck even knew how to teleport, he was so fast.
“Something has to be done about the Moss boy. The Christiansons were supposed to be a warning. Apparently, it did not work since the boy is in ADEPT’s custody.”
“Are you suggesting what I think you are, Herr Dietrich?” He smiled literally from ear to ear, another creepy gift of his. He had the ability to warp, deform or change his appearance at will while still often giving the uninitiated the appearance of being a living, solid human being.
“I am afraid so. It’s a shame. He could have been of so much help to us and I wouldn’t have to deal with that fat fuck in there,” he said, motioning to the Hole.
Jodl nodded. He knew Dietrich was talking about Dragović. Perhaps it was best that Jodl was trusted enough to live outside the Hole. The old Nazi was sure he would’ve eviscerated the old Communist the same way he did those twin girls back in Massachusetts. It wouldn’t have killed him any more than it would’ve killed the twins (there’s only one way to kill a ghost and mutilation is certainly not the way). But he would’ve given him more exquisite agony than even the energy field disruptor that Dietrich loved to use on the cantankerous.
“When do you want it done, Herr Dietrich?”
“Tonight. I want it to be over with. We cannot take a chance of him developing into what I suspect.”
“And that is?”
“Our worst nightmare. Go.”
The room containing the Hole immediately got warmer when Jodl disappeared through the steel door and Dietrich unzipped his leather trench coat. He looked at the Hole’s round window and wondered how Dragović was faring in his massive recruitment drive. Dietrich had done his part. Now it was up to Dragović to do his.
The Bone Bridge: Chapter 28
Part Two
Chapter 28
(Vienna, Virginia)
Her kid brother Eddie used to joke when she first painted her house that it “was done by the same people who design Valentine’s Day cards.” Indeed, Virginia Hobbes’ house was painted pink with red trimming. Pink paint from stem to stern and blood red shutters. Her late nephew Chaz in the last couple of years of his life took to calling it “the Pepto Bismol house.”
Oddly enough, she didn’t grow pink carnations and red roses in her front yard garden in keeping with the house’s garish color scheme. A woman with a stereotypically feminine eye for pink or scandalous crimson, Virginia insisted on growing a vegetable garden. Spinach, for reasons neither she not anyone else could ever fathom, was her gustatory and gardening passion. Eddie’s nickname for her was “Popeye.”
Yet little of it was grown for her own consumption. Her primary reason for the spinach patch was her dogs, her “organic dogs” as the neighbors called them. Her pack consisted of an Afghan, a Great Dane, a St. Bernard and a Newfoundland. By the time they were fully grown, her main spinach patch in the back yard had grown to half an acre.
She stood in the middle of what remained of her garden from the last harvest and considered expanding it to three quarters of an acre. Lord knew she had room to spare- Her back yard was fifteen acres. Something moved beside her feet among the remnants of the yellowed and shriveled spinach plants. It was an earthworm and she delicately picked it up and examined it. It slowly expanded and accordioned through her fingers.
“Hello, little dude. Better get your rest. You have your work cut out for you next spring and summer.” She then gently placed him where she found him and hoped none of the dogs would squash him when she’d let them out after dinner.
A car’s engine then diverted her attention to her driveway and she walked out of the ruins of her vegetable garden to investigate, although Virginia had suspected who it was. Sure enough, it was her kid brother Eddie.
“Pee Wee! You still driving that Ford? I thought the car gods would have done you a favor and flushed that piece of shit into the ecosystem by now!” Despite having lived in Virginia for the past 27 years, Virginia never lost her earthy Boston accent and brash northeast way of expressing herself.
Ed Coffey looked embarrassed at hearing his big sister’s decades-old sobriquet for him, a relic of their childhood. Then when she saw Adam get out of the passenger side, she stopped and looked at him. My God, what a gorgeous boy, she thought as he tossed his long bangs out of his eyes, even if his haircut left something to be desired. The kid clutched a skateboard against his chest and she wistfully thought of her nephew Chaz.
“Hey, Pee Wee, you and Bea get into the adoption business?” She gave her little brother a hug. She was 53 but with her buxom figure and flaming red hair tightly pulled back in a permanent half ponytail, she could’ve passed for Ed’s younger sister. She’d always ascribed her youth and vitality to living the organic lifestyle and was always trying to get Ed to do the same. Coffey would counter that chili dogs and stale coffee made him a sexual brontosaurus.
“Virge, do me a favor, huh? Ixnay on the Eepay eeway, okay?” He jerked his head back toward Adam, who remained at the passenger side of the car.
“Alright, alright. Hey, kid. Come on over. I won’t bite. Besides, I’m a vegetarian.” The kid took a tentative step toward the pair but remained beside the Crown Vic. “Oh. My. God. You got a shy one! I love the shy ones!” She then did something that Adam never expected- she took off in a full sprint toward him. Adam barely had time to look at Coffey once before he was smothered in arms and full breasts. Ed shook his head and went back to the car to pull out the gym bag.
Adam got knocked down in the back yard again by Neptune the St. Bernard. The other behemoths danced in a circle around him, waiting for him to get up so they, too, could knock him off his feet. The kid never stopped laughing from the moment he ran out with them.
“He’s got the gift, Eddie, I’m telling you. When I hugged him and touched his skin, I knew.”
“You don’t have to tell me that, Virge,” Ed said while sipping a glass of lemonade with her on the back deck that overlooked the spacious back yard. “When are you going to wash those fucking beasts? I could smell them all the way from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.”
“Shut the fuck up… Pee Wee.”
“I told you to stop calling me that, Virge.”
“Only in front of the kid. That’s about as far as I’ll bend.”
“But you’re right about him, Sis. He is special. His sister’s boss said something to him yesterday back in Boston, something about him ‘developing.’ Developing into what?”
Virginia turned to see Adam again, who momentarily regained his footing and dodged Neptune just before getting decked again by Jupiter the Afghan. Adam looked nothing like Chaz and was already at least two-two and half years older than her nephew had the chance to be. Yet in the way he played with the dogs, the way he moved and dodged between them, the way he opened up his lovely face with that laugh… It made her eyes water and Virginia Hobbes never cried even when her late industrialist husband died 11 years ago of cancer.
“Something the world has never seen before, Eddie. I don’t know what but even novelists haven’t imagined anything like what that kid will be.”
“What do you mean?” Eddie asked, inching closer to his sister.
She looked at him again before continuing. “There’s a tremendous energy not only around him but emanating from him. I can practically see his aura without looking too hard. With everyone else, I have to concentrate but not with him, his energy signature is so strong. Like I said, Eddie, I don’t know yet what he’s gonna become but I’ll tell you this much: You two didn’t come alone.”
Ed looked at his charge again. The dogs began another pursuit but it wasn’t of Adam. Whatever they were chasing was moving in circles around them and about four or five feet in the air. And even for Vienna, Virginia, it was too late in the year for insects.
“Let me guess: You don’t like my spinach.”
“Oh, no, ma’m, I like it fine.” Nonetheless, Adam picked at the food on his plate and poked through the spinach that Virginia had pulled out of the freezer as if he’d never seen the vegetable before.
“Look, just because I feed it to my dogs doesn’t mean that it’s dog food.”
“Oh, I know! It’s great, really. In fact, this is the first home-cooked meal that I’ve had in days. Plus, my Mom’s not that great a cook to begin with.”
“So, your family’s Jewish?”
“Yes. Though we’re really not that fanatical about it.”
“Yet you have the one Jewish mother who can’t cook. You poor kid. No wonder you’re so thin.” Adam shyly smiled and tossed his bangs out of his eyes.
“Oh, I love when you do that with your hair. You remind me so much of Chaz.” Adam suddenly looked uncomfortable and glanced over at Coffey.
“Careful, Sis. You’re old enough to be his grandmother.”
“Oh, shut the f… Shut up… Pee Wee. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Uh huh. You know what they used to call her in high school, Adam? You know, since we’re bringing out the nicknames?”
“Don’t you dare, you fat fuck.”
“They used to call her 50 Yard Line ever since a rather embarrassing story about her and the varsity football team on prom night.”
“That is not true and you know it!” Virginia bellowed loud enough for Georgetown to hear.
“Uh huh.”
“Alright, it was only the star running back. How was I supposed to know that his voyeuristic teammates were watching from under the bleachers?”
“Thank God there weren’t any such things as video cameras and Youtube back then,” Ed said as he started to clear the table. Adam looked like he wanted to crawl under it with the dogs.
“It was just one guy and we weren’t even naked. Well, not totally. We were just, you know, making out.” Adam politely nodded. “The 50 yard line was Duane’s idea.”
Adam asked if he could be excused. Virginia said sure and after he was gone, she pinched the bridge of her nose. “God damn you, Eddie,” she whispered.
Ed came back from the kitchen and peeked into his sister’s living room. Adam was hunkered down on the couch, already flipping through the channels with the remote.
“Good, we’re finally alone.”
“You brought out that story just to get rid of him? Thanks a lot, asshole.”
“Hey, whatever works, right?” He handed her a slice of homemade apple pie and said as he licked his thumb, “Don’t call me Pee Wee in front of him ever again.”
“You have a point,” she said as she grabbed the plate from his hand. “It’s not as if you live up to your billing anymore. Unless Bea has something to add to that.” Ed gave her a caustic look.
“I think we’d better get off this track, Virge. I wanted to talk to you alone about Adam, anyway. You know why I brought him over here.”
“It wasn’t for my spinach and apple pie, that’s for sure.”
“You’re all I have. You’re the only other person in the world I can trust.”
“I know that. You think I’m stupid?”
“You have a gift, too. Something I never believed until just before Chaz died.”
Virginia had called Ed from this very same room nearly three years ago because of a nightmare and an unshakable sense of foreboding about Chaz. She dreamed that he fell from a great height and that Ed was going to see the whole thing. In fact, she’d described what would happen to him in almost perfect detail in her single dream. She’d had the gift her whole life although sometimes she’d call it a curse.
“I’ll do what I can with him, Eddie. But you have to understand, it’s not like a faucet I can turn on and off at will. The stars and houses have to be aligned just right and…”
“Yeah, yeah. Well, however you do it, just do it fast if you can. Because I just have a sense that they’re going to find us if we hang around here too much longer and I have no idea literally where to go from here.”
“I’ll do my best, Eddie. You know I will.” She turned in her chair and watched Jupiter, the smallest of the four dogs, get on Adam’s lap. The kid held his nose for a brief instant but kept the Afghan on his lap.
“And give those fucking dogs a bath, will ya? Before you get a visit from the Board of Health?”
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The Bone Bridge, Chapter 27
“Look, you may have to tell your girlfriend that I have to pull over and get some sleep,” I said. It was already half past midnight and every time I blinked I was less and less sure that I’d be able to reopen my eyes. Adam had no better an idea where we were headed than I did but at this point I would’ve given up my poor equivalent of a kingdom and a horse for a bed and pillow.
I pulled onto the exit and into a motor lodge that offered vacancies. I paid in cash, careful to withdraw as much as I could afford back home so I wouldn’t have to use any of my cards once I hit the road. I motioned for Adam to get out of the car as I walked to the room.
“Clarissa didn’t look too happy about you turnin’ off.”
“Tough shit,” I said as the key clattered on the table. “She still hasn’t said where she’s leading us to?”
“Naw, she hasn’t said anything. She just… I dunno, appeared in front of your car when I hopped in.”
The kid frowned in thought as if sensing, like me, that being led by the nose by a ghost was no suitable substitute for a GPS.
While I hated distrusting Clarissa either dead or alive, there was something kinda bogus about the whole thing. I mean, why not just get in the car with us, why didn’t she talk to me? And there was something weird about the way she was scoping me out when she first appeared. It was like she wanted to fuck my brains out. Which ordinarily wouldn’t bug me but Clarissa never looked at me like that, with pure lust. I also couldn’t understand why the twins disappeared after I stopped coasting on my board. Maybe it was just one of those random ghost things that I’ll never understand.
After Coffey and I used the bathroom he took off his coat and shoes and got into bed with the rest of his clothes. He even wore his holster but I noticed that he put his gun under the pillow.
“I just remembered, dude. I don’t have a toothbrush or anything.” Coffey pointed to a gym bag that he’d dropped under the round table near the door.
“The shaving caddy in the bag. I gotcha a few things. Just take whatever’s unopened.”
“Really? You got things for me? Why?”
“Cuz I had a feeling you’d be coming with me. Now brush your teeth, Chaz, and go to bed.”
By the time I realized he called me by the wrong name. Coffey was already snoring. Who was Chaz? Then I remembered him telling me at the skateboard park on my birthday about a son he used to have who “would have been” my age. I wondered what happened to him.
Asking him tonight was obviously out and, besides, wherever Clarissa was taking us I had a feeling we’d have plenty of time in the car to talk about it.
I unzipped the red gym bag and found the leather caddy. I opened it and found among Coffey’s stuff a new tube of toothpaste, an unopened toothbrush and dental floss. I took all three into the bathroom. We’d stopped off at a Burger King earlier and I was dying to brush and floss the food out from between my teeth.
It wasn’t until I looked at myself in the mirror that I realized how flat-on-my-ass tired I was. Aside from my stunt at the gas station, all I did was sit on my ass in Coffey’s shitbox and even when I was on my board, it wasn’t even moving under my own power.
Then again, I saw two nice people get murdered before my eyes, not to mention the slicing and dicing of their already dead daughters, I was arrested for their killings then realized I couldn’t trust my own sister when I found out our parents were grabbed by her agency and hidden somewhere.
So I guess even when your body’s inactive emotional and mental stress alone can fuck you up pretty good. Before Halloween last month, about the most stressful thing I usually had to face was wondering whether I was going to get my cherry popped before graduation.
I brushed and flossed my teeth and as I tapped the water out of the brush I saw in the porcelain sink something that didn’t look kosher. The sink was still wet and was reflecting something behind me. No, not behind me- above me. I looked up at the ceiling and almost fell down as I saw Clarissa’s head and one of her arms. She was coming out of the light but looked like she was stuck. Her beautiful face looked like it was made of pure energy.
Her arm was reaching down to me like something was holding her up and away from me. Her ponytail moved in slow motion like a snake. Ordinarily her hair would’ve been hanging straight down but the laws of physics don’t apply to ghosts. She looked really antsy and I noticed her old wounds were back. They were missing when Coffey and I were following her.
“Clarissa? What’s the matter? What are you trying to say?” She was mouthing two words over and over but I couldn’t see her lips well enough to read them. Then I remembered Ramon’s digital recorder. I whipped it out of my hooded sweatshirt’s pocket and hit the “record” button.
About a second or two later, she was pulled up through the ceiling like she was jerked back with a cable. I rewound the file to the beginning and I heard a faint voice. I rewound it again and turned the volume all the way up. The background hiss made it even harder to hear what she was saying. So I fished out the ear buds that I bought with some of my birthday money, put them in my ears then rewound the file again. After I turned down the volume, I could finally hear what Clarissa was trying to tell me-
“Don’t. Go!”
(Folsom, North Carolina, the next morning)
“Who’s Chaz?” I asked Coffey through half a McDonald’s breakfast burrito. Coffey got about a half a dozen of them and I was already scarfing down my second one.
He was about to take a bite out of his then put it down in the wrapper on the bed. He looked at me with sad puppy dog eyes and I braced myself for a sob story. I don’t wanna sound like a heartless prick and all but c’mon, dude, it’s not like I don’t already get treated like Dear fucking Abby by the dead.
“How’d you know his name?”
“You called me ‘Chaz’ last night just before you passed out and started doing an impression of Cape Canaveral.”
“Sorry about the snoring.”
“So, who was he? Your kid?” I took another bite out of my burrito.
“Yeah,” he said after a long pause.
“I can see you don’t wanna talk about it. That’s cool. I didn’t mean to pry.” I took a hit off my orange juice, hoping that Coffey would take the out I gave him.
“I suppose it’s time I talked about it.” No such luck, I guess. I took another sip from my OJ and listened.
“Here’s what happened…”
(Outside Hartford, Ct, the night before)
“Okay, Moss, report. What did you get on Coffey?”
“He’s a former Green Beret, spent eight years in, seven of them as a commando with JSOC.”
“Fuckin’ great. What else?”
“After serving alongside NATO forces in Bosnia and Kosovo, he got out and entered the police academy. Graduated 13th highest in his class. After 9 years as a patrol officer, he made sergeant then detective two years after that. Five years ago, he made lieutenant.”
“Well, this last-minute book report doesn’t tell me shit about the man, Moss. I wanna know what makes this motherfucker tick, why he’s pullin’ this shit.”
“Yes, sir. Married 20 years, wife named Beatrice. They had a son named Charles…”
“‘Had’?”
“Yes, sir. Deceased. Almost three years ago.” Blood turned to Laura with a suddenly inflamed interest.
“How’d that happen?”
“When Chaz was 15, he decided he wanted to go out for JV track. He never showed any serious interest in anything else. Not his studies, no hobbies, nothing. Just his skateboard and girls.”
“I like him already.”
“Then, for some reason, he got interested in track.” He finally looked up at me and squinted as he took a swig from his coffee. “His grades weren’t exactly honor roll quality but Bea and I thought if he had some more passion, and it carried over into success at something more meaningful like his education, then why not? So I gave him the standard speech about making time for his homework, keeping his grades up, yada yada. And we gave him our conditional blessing.”
“Then what?”
“Almost three years ago… He was just in the third week of training with the team…” I could tell he was either beating around the bush or trying to find the right words. And even though he volunteered to go on, it didn’t make me feel any less like a total dick to be sitting there and dragging it out of him.
“He was on his way home from practice one day, on his skateboard as usual. I was in the Back Bay looking over a crime scene when I got the call from my wife that Chaz didn’t come home. She said she’d called his cell phone and got no answer. None of his friends had seen him since he left the field.
“I was investigating a multiple murder crime scene so I couldn’t just leave. I called the desk sergeant of our local PD and told them to put out an APB on him and to call my wife and me if they saw or heard from him.
“Another hour into the investigation and I got a call on my cell phone from my colleagues that they found a skateboard and a cell phone about a mile from where he was last seen. I asked them to describe the board and phone and they did… perfectly. They said the phone even rang and when they answered, my wife was on the other end.
“My nighttime counterpart Lt. Rodriguez was just coming on and he told me to take off and take care of business. I high-tailed it to the PD in our neighborhood and talked to one of the detectives. He told me something I already knew- that until 24 hours had gone by, Chaz wouldn’t even be a missing person.
“I showed him my badge and asked them to treat this as an exception just as a professional courtesy. After all, if my son’s abandoned skateboard and his cell phone wasn’t proof right there of foul play, then nothing was.”
“What happened then?”
“What happened… is that we got a phone call. But it wasn’t from Chaz.”
“Who was it?”
“It was from the prick who took him. Some creep named Stan Clossey. He blamed me for him losing his family when I charged him with the murder of a stripper.”
“Did he do it?”
“Of course he did. His DNA was all over her corpse. But he blamed his so-called partner. Clossey had been following Chaz ever since he got out of prison…”
“How long was he in for?”
“Five years and a month. Good behavior goes a long way, especially in a crowded prison system.”
“For murder, dude?!”
“Manslaughter. His lawyer apparently had a better sob story than the DA and the girl’s parents. Anyway, Clossey had been following my kid around since he first realized that he took the same route back home every day and that he was exposed on that skateboard. I used to say to Bea that I couldn’t wait until he turned 16 so he could get off that damned board and wrap a car around himself.
“So Clossey picked the most secluded spot on Chaz’s route and got him there. He used chloroform to knock him out and he dragged him into his borrowed van.” I felt like a dick twice over but I had to ask.
“And then…?”
“Then the subject called the Coffeys at their home later that night. On his own cell phone, at that.”
“Oh, that was nice of him!” Blood said with real amusement as he hurtled into the night. “Didn’t the stupid fuck know those things are just oversized homing devices?”
“Maybe, maybe not. He must have assumed that Coffey would have tracing equipment in his house by that time.”
“So what did he say?” I held the phone in my hand and looked at Adam standing next to my wife Beatrice. It was both strange and appropriate to see him standing there in my house instead of Chaz.
“I know you’ll have this call traced in seconds, Coffey, but that’s the idea. Now listen up, ‘cuz I’m only gonna say this once: Meet me at the Quincy shipyard. You ought to know where that is…”
“I do.” The miniature grandfather clock bequeathed to Bea by her late uncle suddenly sounded twice as loud, as if it was reminding me that time was running out on my son. I looked at the cops from both stations that were standing in my house to see if it was bothering them. Apparently, it wasn’t.
“Go to the last ship on the east pier. I’ll be in the pilot house. You bring anyone else with you, I’ll see them from miles away and your kid is history, get it?”
“I understand.”
“What’s a pilot house?” Adam asked as we hustled through the destroyer.
“It’s the bridge, where they pilot the ship. You know, the spoked wheel and all that?” I didn’t know how else to explain it to him and, frankly, I had other things on my mind. I had a hard enough time trying to navigate my way around the ship. There were letters and numbers on the bulkheads that obviously signified something. But I was an Army Green Beret not a squid. After we climbed lots of hand-over-hand ladders and came up against dead ends, we finally saw an entranceway that led up to the pilot house.
The bridge was dark, of course. The ship was still under construction and there was no power on board. I could see Adam’s silhouette sitting in front of the bay window about two feet off the floor, his slender legs crossed, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. “So, were they up there?”
I knew the answer was yes but I couldn’t see them, yet. I swept the barrel of my 9 mil toward the port exit, the left side of the pilot house. That’s where they were. Clossey had picked the end of the longest pier so he could be guaranteed of seeing any other cruisers or cars in case I brought backup.
“Yeah, they’re here,” I absently said to Adam. “Chaz, are you here?”
“I’m afraid it’s past his bedtime, Coffey. He passed out.” His voice seemed to come from everywhere. The sound waves reverberated all over the all metal environment and I had no clear idea where his voice was coming from. Of course, I already knew since this was a memory. The port side hatch, of course, wasn’t battened down. He couldn’t do that from the outside, which is how I knew he was out there.
I pulled the heavy door with all the force I had with my free hand and immediately trained my gun on Clossey.
“So what happened then?” Adam asked, still levitating only closer to me.
“I posted sharpshooters on the deck of another destroyer the next pier over. We had a police boat approach him with three SWAT snipers from the starboard side of the other ship so Clossey wouldn’t hear them.” He couldn’t hear me, either, so I felt confident I could tell Adam what happened. Chaz was hanging limply from Clossey’s powerful right arm and I knew there wasn’t a damned thing I could do to save him no matter how many damned times I relived it.
“The problem was,” I said, still training my Smith and Wesson 9 mil at Clossey’s forehead, “even when a ship is moored to the pier and anchored in place, it’ll still bob up and down and police snipers aren’t trained to make constant teeter totter adjustments like that in the field.”
“Well, well, look who’s here to help me christen the ship.”
“At least one of the SWAT snipers had a clear shot but he couldn’t account for the bobbing of the boat. He made the slightest miscalculation and just nicked Clossey’s skull.”
“Did he kill him?” Adam asked, not reacting to the shot, even though the report made me flinch.
“Not exactly. There wasn’t a rail but a chain behind them and it wasn’t very tall. When Clossey realized he’d been hit, he trained his own gun on Chaz’s head. I raised my gun and my son chose that exact moment to wake up from the chloroform.”
“You fuck, I told you to come alone. You pigs are all cowards! Say bye bye to your kid like I hadda!”
“Let him go!”
“Coffey, dude, it’s over. Chill out.”
I pulled from the under the pillow my nine mil, the same one I used to shoot Clossey, the same one I used to hurtle his worthless, stinking body over the chain, the same one I used to kill my own son when Clossey, in a final, desperate moment of vengeance, pulled my son over the railing with him three decks below. I could see Chaz’s eyes suddenly get huge with panic when he realized what was happening. We’d locked eyes for a half second before he was pulled back.
“No!” I fired a shot and realized that we were no longer on the destroyer but back in a flea bag motor lodge in North Carolina. Adam was back on his bed, his legs crossed, index fingers in his ears, eyes bigger than Chaz’s in his final moments. I could hear a woman scream from outside the door I’d just shot. I got up and opened it and looked at a Latina chambermaid, her eyes as big as Adam’s.
“H-housekeeping. I come back?”
My illusions of being kept safe by Detective Coffey were pretty much permanently road kill after he put a bullet through the front door of our motel room and almost waxed a chambermaid in the process. I learned from this experience that a badge and a half-assed story about an accidental gun shot can take you a long way, especially if you can write a check for the damages. Needless to say, the poor Latin American chick that had to clean up after us got a big tip from the guy who almost blew her head off. God only knows how much worse it mighta gone if they knew I was with him at the motel, a teenaged boy almost young enough to be his grandson.
Maybe what got him some sympathy from the motel manager was the fact that we were in North Carolina, which is already pretty much Deliverance land, a part of the country where even baby cribs come with built-in gun racks. Coffey told me after we hit the road that the manager even pulled out his sawed-off 12 gauge that he kept under the counter and my guardian told me he pretended to have a good laugh with him over the incident (that is, once he passed him a check for $300.).
“I’m really sorry about that, kiddo. I’ve never done that before. It was like… like you were there with me but embedded in my memory. There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t relive at least a few moments of that day but I swear it was never like that before. It was never that real.” He looked over to me with real sorrow in his eyes. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what else to say. I’m supposed to be keeping you safe, for crissake.”
“Alright, it’s over, dude. I won’t ask you about him ever again. Besides, I have to tell you something.” When he looked at me again, I pulled out the audio recorder and played back what I’d recorded in the bathroom the night before.
The ghost that I thought was Clarissa was obviously an imposter somehow, which meant that the closest thing we had to a plan was now dog shit. Coffey kept heading south, even though he obviously had no fucking clue where we were going to go now. Then suddenly he took an exit, circled around and began heading north.
“Where are we going, dude?”
“Virginia.”
“What’s in Virginia?”
“Virginia. My older sister.” He looked at me again. “Her name is Virginia, too. And she’s the only person I can trust.”
Elle had long since briefed her boss about Coffey. Later that night, after discovering that his kid was killed in a freak accident after a kidnapping gone wrong, she dug deeper and discovered what happened in Bosnia during Coffey’s last mission with the Green Berets.
After the second briefing, Blood had said, “Shit, between his kid getting offed and what happened in Bosnia with that other teenaged boy, sounds to me like this is a man who’s definitely on a mission. He might even be delusional enough to think that Adam’s his own kid.” If it was supposed to set Elle’s mind more at ease to hear that her little brother was now in the custody of a former commando who still has issues, then it was failing miserably.
But Blood was nonetheless making a valid point: If anything or anyone, even Adam’s own sister, tried to get between him and Ed Coffey, there was no telling what he might do. There was no way to tell for sure or to accurately predict what was going through the homicide detective’s mind but it would be foolhardy at best to assume that he didn’t appoint himself Adam’s savior based on two tragedies that were largely beyond his control but for which he was accepting responsibility.
Milo Dragović uncertainly hovered above the floor of the Hole, reminding Dietrich of an astronaut in zero G floating before a port hole.
“You know what you’re asking, don’t you? Even if I could reach so many people, I will be helping you to unleash a war unlike any other the world has ever seen. Millions could die.”
“I can understand your reluctance. You are used to working with much smaller figures. But yes, Milo, I know exactly what I am asking for.”
“How am I to reach ten million lost souls and how could you hope to control them?”
“Let me take care of that. Just make sure that your oratorical skills haven’t decayed along with your body.”
(End of Part One)
I pulled onto the exit and into a motor lodge that offered vacancies. I paid in cash, careful to withdraw as much as I could afford back home so I wouldn’t have to use any of my cards once I hit the road. I motioned for Adam to get out of the car as I walked to the room.
“Clarissa didn’t look too happy about you turnin’ off.”
“Tough shit,” I said as the key clattered on the table. “She still hasn’t said where she’s leading us to?”
“Naw, she hasn’t said anything. She just… I dunno, appeared in front of your car when I hopped in.”
The kid frowned in thought as if sensing, like me, that being led by the nose by a ghost was no suitable substitute for a GPS.
While I hated distrusting Clarissa either dead or alive, there was something kinda bogus about the whole thing. I mean, why not just get in the car with us, why didn’t she talk to me? And there was something weird about the way she was scoping me out when she first appeared. It was like she wanted to fuck my brains out. Which ordinarily wouldn’t bug me but Clarissa never looked at me like that, with pure lust. I also couldn’t understand why the twins disappeared after I stopped coasting on my board. Maybe it was just one of those random ghost things that I’ll never understand.
After Coffey and I used the bathroom he took off his coat and shoes and got into bed with the rest of his clothes. He even wore his holster but I noticed that he put his gun under the pillow.
“I just remembered, dude. I don’t have a toothbrush or anything.” Coffey pointed to a gym bag that he’d dropped under the round table near the door.
“The shaving caddy in the bag. I gotcha a few things. Just take whatever’s unopened.”
“Really? You got things for me? Why?”
“Cuz I had a feeling you’d be coming with me. Now brush your teeth, Chaz, and go to bed.”
By the time I realized he called me by the wrong name. Coffey was already snoring. Who was Chaz? Then I remembered him telling me at the skateboard park on my birthday about a son he used to have who “would have been” my age. I wondered what happened to him.
Asking him tonight was obviously out and, besides, wherever Clarissa was taking us I had a feeling we’d have plenty of time in the car to talk about it.
I unzipped the red gym bag and found the leather caddy. I opened it and found among Coffey’s stuff a new tube of toothpaste, an unopened toothbrush and dental floss. I took all three into the bathroom. We’d stopped off at a Burger King earlier and I was dying to brush and floss the food out from between my teeth.
It wasn’t until I looked at myself in the mirror that I realized how flat-on-my-ass tired I was. Aside from my stunt at the gas station, all I did was sit on my ass in Coffey’s shitbox and even when I was on my board, it wasn’t even moving under my own power.
Then again, I saw two nice people get murdered before my eyes, not to mention the slicing and dicing of their already dead daughters, I was arrested for their killings then realized I couldn’t trust my own sister when I found out our parents were grabbed by her agency and hidden somewhere.
So I guess even when your body’s inactive emotional and mental stress alone can fuck you up pretty good. Before Halloween last month, about the most stressful thing I usually had to face was wondering whether I was going to get my cherry popped before graduation.
I brushed and flossed my teeth and as I tapped the water out of the brush I saw in the porcelain sink something that didn’t look kosher. The sink was still wet and was reflecting something behind me. No, not behind me- above me. I looked up at the ceiling and almost fell down as I saw Clarissa’s head and one of her arms. She was coming out of the light but looked like she was stuck. Her beautiful face looked like it was made of pure energy.
Her arm was reaching down to me like something was holding her up and away from me. Her ponytail moved in slow motion like a snake. Ordinarily her hair would’ve been hanging straight down but the laws of physics don’t apply to ghosts. She looked really antsy and I noticed her old wounds were back. They were missing when Coffey and I were following her.
“Clarissa? What’s the matter? What are you trying to say?” She was mouthing two words over and over but I couldn’t see her lips well enough to read them. Then I remembered Ramon’s digital recorder. I whipped it out of my hooded sweatshirt’s pocket and hit the “record” button.
About a second or two later, she was pulled up through the ceiling like she was jerked back with a cable. I rewound the file to the beginning and I heard a faint voice. I rewound it again and turned the volume all the way up. The background hiss made it even harder to hear what she was saying. So I fished out the ear buds that I bought with some of my birthday money, put them in my ears then rewound the file again. After I turned down the volume, I could finally hear what Clarissa was trying to tell me-
“Don’t. Go!”
(Folsom, North Carolina, the next morning)
“Who’s Chaz?” I asked Coffey through half a McDonald’s breakfast burrito. Coffey got about a half a dozen of them and I was already scarfing down my second one.
He was about to take a bite out of his then put it down in the wrapper on the bed. He looked at me with sad puppy dog eyes and I braced myself for a sob story. I don’t wanna sound like a heartless prick and all but c’mon, dude, it’s not like I don’t already get treated like Dear fucking Abby by the dead.
“How’d you know his name?”
“You called me ‘Chaz’ last night just before you passed out and started doing an impression of Cape Canaveral.”
“Sorry about the snoring.”
“So, who was he? Your kid?” I took another bite out of my burrito.
“Yeah,” he said after a long pause.
“I can see you don’t wanna talk about it. That’s cool. I didn’t mean to pry.” I took a hit off my orange juice, hoping that Coffey would take the out I gave him.
“I suppose it’s time I talked about it.” No such luck, I guess. I took another sip from my OJ and listened.
“Here’s what happened…”
(Outside Hartford, Ct, the night before)
“Okay, Moss, report. What did you get on Coffey?”
“He’s a former Green Beret, spent eight years in, seven of them as a commando with JSOC.”
“Fuckin’ great. What else?”
“After serving alongside NATO forces in Bosnia and Kosovo, he got out and entered the police academy. Graduated 13th highest in his class. After 9 years as a patrol officer, he made sergeant then detective two years after that. Five years ago, he made lieutenant.”
“Well, this last-minute book report doesn’t tell me shit about the man, Moss. I wanna know what makes this motherfucker tick, why he’s pullin’ this shit.”
“Yes, sir. Married 20 years, wife named Beatrice. They had a son named Charles…”
“‘Had’?”
“Yes, sir. Deceased. Almost three years ago.” Blood turned to Laura with a suddenly inflamed interest.
“How’d that happen?”
“When Chaz was 15, he decided he wanted to go out for JV track. He never showed any serious interest in anything else. Not his studies, no hobbies, nothing. Just his skateboard and girls.”
“I like him already.”
“Then, for some reason, he got interested in track.” He finally looked up at me and squinted as he took a swig from his coffee. “His grades weren’t exactly honor roll quality but Bea and I thought if he had some more passion, and it carried over into success at something more meaningful like his education, then why not? So I gave him the standard speech about making time for his homework, keeping his grades up, yada yada. And we gave him our conditional blessing.”
“Then what?”
“Almost three years ago… He was just in the third week of training with the team…” I could tell he was either beating around the bush or trying to find the right words. And even though he volunteered to go on, it didn’t make me feel any less like a total dick to be sitting there and dragging it out of him.
“He was on his way home from practice one day, on his skateboard as usual. I was in the Back Bay looking over a crime scene when I got the call from my wife that Chaz didn’t come home. She said she’d called his cell phone and got no answer. None of his friends had seen him since he left the field.
“I was investigating a multiple murder crime scene so I couldn’t just leave. I called the desk sergeant of our local PD and told them to put out an APB on him and to call my wife and me if they saw or heard from him.
“Another hour into the investigation and I got a call on my cell phone from my colleagues that they found a skateboard and a cell phone about a mile from where he was last seen. I asked them to describe the board and phone and they did… perfectly. They said the phone even rang and when they answered, my wife was on the other end.
“My nighttime counterpart Lt. Rodriguez was just coming on and he told me to take off and take care of business. I high-tailed it to the PD in our neighborhood and talked to one of the detectives. He told me something I already knew- that until 24 hours had gone by, Chaz wouldn’t even be a missing person.
“I showed him my badge and asked them to treat this as an exception just as a professional courtesy. After all, if my son’s abandoned skateboard and his cell phone wasn’t proof right there of foul play, then nothing was.”
“What happened then?”
“What happened… is that we got a phone call. But it wasn’t from Chaz.”
“Who was it?”
“It was from the prick who took him. Some creep named Stan Clossey. He blamed me for him losing his family when I charged him with the murder of a stripper.”
“Did he do it?”
“Of course he did. His DNA was all over her corpse. But he blamed his so-called partner. Clossey had been following Chaz ever since he got out of prison…”
“How long was he in for?”
“Five years and a month. Good behavior goes a long way, especially in a crowded prison system.”
“For murder, dude?!”
“Manslaughter. His lawyer apparently had a better sob story than the DA and the girl’s parents. Anyway, Clossey had been following my kid around since he first realized that he took the same route back home every day and that he was exposed on that skateboard. I used to say to Bea that I couldn’t wait until he turned 16 so he could get off that damned board and wrap a car around himself.
“So Clossey picked the most secluded spot on Chaz’s route and got him there. He used chloroform to knock him out and he dragged him into his borrowed van.” I felt like a dick twice over but I had to ask.
“And then…?”
“Then the subject called the Coffeys at their home later that night. On his own cell phone, at that.”
“Oh, that was nice of him!” Blood said with real amusement as he hurtled into the night. “Didn’t the stupid fuck know those things are just oversized homing devices?”
“Maybe, maybe not. He must have assumed that Coffey would have tracing equipment in his house by that time.”
“So what did he say?” I held the phone in my hand and looked at Adam standing next to my wife Beatrice. It was both strange and appropriate to see him standing there in my house instead of Chaz.
“I know you’ll have this call traced in seconds, Coffey, but that’s the idea. Now listen up, ‘cuz I’m only gonna say this once: Meet me at the Quincy shipyard. You ought to know where that is…”
“I do.” The miniature grandfather clock bequeathed to Bea by her late uncle suddenly sounded twice as loud, as if it was reminding me that time was running out on my son. I looked at the cops from both stations that were standing in my house to see if it was bothering them. Apparently, it wasn’t.
“Go to the last ship on the east pier. I’ll be in the pilot house. You bring anyone else with you, I’ll see them from miles away and your kid is history, get it?”
“I understand.”
“What’s a pilot house?” Adam asked as we hustled through the destroyer.
“It’s the bridge, where they pilot the ship. You know, the spoked wheel and all that?” I didn’t know how else to explain it to him and, frankly, I had other things on my mind. I had a hard enough time trying to navigate my way around the ship. There were letters and numbers on the bulkheads that obviously signified something. But I was an Army Green Beret not a squid. After we climbed lots of hand-over-hand ladders and came up against dead ends, we finally saw an entranceway that led up to the pilot house.
The bridge was dark, of course. The ship was still under construction and there was no power on board. I could see Adam’s silhouette sitting in front of the bay window about two feet off the floor, his slender legs crossed, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. “So, were they up there?”
I knew the answer was yes but I couldn’t see them, yet. I swept the barrel of my 9 mil toward the port exit, the left side of the pilot house. That’s where they were. Clossey had picked the end of the longest pier so he could be guaranteed of seeing any other cruisers or cars in case I brought backup.
“Yeah, they’re here,” I absently said to Adam. “Chaz, are you here?”
“I’m afraid it’s past his bedtime, Coffey. He passed out.” His voice seemed to come from everywhere. The sound waves reverberated all over the all metal environment and I had no clear idea where his voice was coming from. Of course, I already knew since this was a memory. The port side hatch, of course, wasn’t battened down. He couldn’t do that from the outside, which is how I knew he was out there.
I pulled the heavy door with all the force I had with my free hand and immediately trained my gun on Clossey.
“So what happened then?” Adam asked, still levitating only closer to me.
“I posted sharpshooters on the deck of another destroyer the next pier over. We had a police boat approach him with three SWAT snipers from the starboard side of the other ship so Clossey wouldn’t hear them.” He couldn’t hear me, either, so I felt confident I could tell Adam what happened. Chaz was hanging limply from Clossey’s powerful right arm and I knew there wasn’t a damned thing I could do to save him no matter how many damned times I relived it.
“The problem was,” I said, still training my Smith and Wesson 9 mil at Clossey’s forehead, “even when a ship is moored to the pier and anchored in place, it’ll still bob up and down and police snipers aren’t trained to make constant teeter totter adjustments like that in the field.”
“Well, well, look who’s here to help me christen the ship.”
“At least one of the SWAT snipers had a clear shot but he couldn’t account for the bobbing of the boat. He made the slightest miscalculation and just nicked Clossey’s skull.”
“Did he kill him?” Adam asked, not reacting to the shot, even though the report made me flinch.
“Not exactly. There wasn’t a rail but a chain behind them and it wasn’t very tall. When Clossey realized he’d been hit, he trained his own gun on Chaz’s head. I raised my gun and my son chose that exact moment to wake up from the chloroform.”
“You fuck, I told you to come alone. You pigs are all cowards! Say bye bye to your kid like I hadda!”
“Let him go!”
“Coffey, dude, it’s over. Chill out.”
I pulled from the under the pillow my nine mil, the same one I used to shoot Clossey, the same one I used to hurtle his worthless, stinking body over the chain, the same one I used to kill my own son when Clossey, in a final, desperate moment of vengeance, pulled my son over the railing with him three decks below. I could see Chaz’s eyes suddenly get huge with panic when he realized what was happening. We’d locked eyes for a half second before he was pulled back.
“No!” I fired a shot and realized that we were no longer on the destroyer but back in a flea bag motor lodge in North Carolina. Adam was back on his bed, his legs crossed, index fingers in his ears, eyes bigger than Chaz’s in his final moments. I could hear a woman scream from outside the door I’d just shot. I got up and opened it and looked at a Latina chambermaid, her eyes as big as Adam’s.
“H-housekeeping. I come back?”
My illusions of being kept safe by Detective Coffey were pretty much permanently road kill after he put a bullet through the front door of our motel room and almost waxed a chambermaid in the process. I learned from this experience that a badge and a half-assed story about an accidental gun shot can take you a long way, especially if you can write a check for the damages. Needless to say, the poor Latin American chick that had to clean up after us got a big tip from the guy who almost blew her head off. God only knows how much worse it mighta gone if they knew I was with him at the motel, a teenaged boy almost young enough to be his grandson.
Maybe what got him some sympathy from the motel manager was the fact that we were in North Carolina, which is already pretty much Deliverance land, a part of the country where even baby cribs come with built-in gun racks. Coffey told me after we hit the road that the manager even pulled out his sawed-off 12 gauge that he kept under the counter and my guardian told me he pretended to have a good laugh with him over the incident (that is, once he passed him a check for $300.).
“I’m really sorry about that, kiddo. I’ve never done that before. It was like… like you were there with me but embedded in my memory. There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t relive at least a few moments of that day but I swear it was never like that before. It was never that real.” He looked over to me with real sorrow in his eyes. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what else to say. I’m supposed to be keeping you safe, for crissake.”
“Alright, it’s over, dude. I won’t ask you about him ever again. Besides, I have to tell you something.” When he looked at me again, I pulled out the audio recorder and played back what I’d recorded in the bathroom the night before.
The ghost that I thought was Clarissa was obviously an imposter somehow, which meant that the closest thing we had to a plan was now dog shit. Coffey kept heading south, even though he obviously had no fucking clue where we were going to go now. Then suddenly he took an exit, circled around and began heading north.
“Where are we going, dude?”
“Virginia.”
“What’s in Virginia?”
“Virginia. My older sister.” He looked at me again. “Her name is Virginia, too. And she’s the only person I can trust.”
Elle had long since briefed her boss about Coffey. Later that night, after discovering that his kid was killed in a freak accident after a kidnapping gone wrong, she dug deeper and discovered what happened in Bosnia during Coffey’s last mission with the Green Berets.
After the second briefing, Blood had said, “Shit, between his kid getting offed and what happened in Bosnia with that other teenaged boy, sounds to me like this is a man who’s definitely on a mission. He might even be delusional enough to think that Adam’s his own kid.” If it was supposed to set Elle’s mind more at ease to hear that her little brother was now in the custody of a former commando who still has issues, then it was failing miserably.
But Blood was nonetheless making a valid point: If anything or anyone, even Adam’s own sister, tried to get between him and Ed Coffey, there was no telling what he might do. There was no way to tell for sure or to accurately predict what was going through the homicide detective’s mind but it would be foolhardy at best to assume that he didn’t appoint himself Adam’s savior based on two tragedies that were largely beyond his control but for which he was accepting responsibility.
Milo Dragović uncertainly hovered above the floor of the Hole, reminding Dietrich of an astronaut in zero G floating before a port hole.
“You know what you’re asking, don’t you? Even if I could reach so many people, I will be helping you to unleash a war unlike any other the world has ever seen. Millions could die.”
“I can understand your reluctance. You are used to working with much smaller figures. But yes, Milo, I know exactly what I am asking for.”
“How am I to reach ten million lost souls and how could you hope to control them?”
“Let me take care of that. Just make sure that your oratorical skills haven’t decayed along with your body.”
The Bone Bridge- Chapter 26
(The Hole)
Hans Dietrich took off his black leather trench coat and tossed it on the bare metal desk. Ordinarily, he never wore the thing, anymore. But in keeping with his rare but cruel humor, he wore it to his group’s latest “investigation” at the Nesterov Art Museum in Ufa. It was also the same coat he wore the day he killed his new acquisition- Milo Dragović.
Separating the former Slavic dictator from his wife wasn’t easy. Dietrich knew that acquiring her would be a waste of time and energy. The Olympic silver medalist and former Vice Chairman of the national Communist Party had hated him from the beginning and for good reason. Her cooperation, to say the least, could not be counted on.
There was another reason to leave her behind to haunt the Nesterov Museum- Now separated from her, Dragović’s only chance to be reunited with his wife Irina was to cooperate. It was a promise he made to all those trapped souls: Cooperate and I’ll personally send you and your beloved on to the next world.
How would they know that he lacked both the technology and the inclination to effect that?
Dietrich approached the cottage-sized chamber and touched a readout. From the moment of acquisition, every entity’s unique energy signature was logged into the mainframe and identified by name. Dragović was no exception and it wasn’t difficult to call up that signature and get the former dictator’s attention by disrupting his energy field. The effect across the board was, to ghosts, a sensation akin to what we call physical pain or discomfort.
“Over here, at the window,” Dietrich said to the intercom. As always, the trapped spirits roiled and were restlessly moving like caged panthers. About 50 would appear then phase out of sight to be replaced by the others. All told, Dietrich had collected a menagerie of 117 of the world’s most noxious spirits.
As he waited for Dragović to appear at the large round window, Dietrich amused himself by wondering how well his latest acquisition was getting along with his new playmates. Putting a guy like Dragović in with this bunch was like dropping a soft, wimpy pedophile into a general population made up entirely of murderers and other types that would best be served in a mental institution for the criminally insane. If they chewed him up and spit him out, c’est la vie. Then Dietrich would continue looking for his uniter.
But if he survived this baptism of fire, as it were, so much the better. And the German truly hoped that he could count on Dragović. Hitler would’ve been a more logical not to mention efficacious choice but for some reason he was unavailable. Besides, the dragon of Central Europe owed him.
On the finger touch screen, Dietrich fine-tuned the energy signature finder and locked on before dragging his finger over the control that interrupted Milo’s energy matrix. The speaker was on and when he slid his fingertip over the control, he could hear a cry of pain.
“Milo, come to the window and I’ll stop,” he said in Russian. Eventually, a portly figure emerged from the swirling chaos and went to the three inch-thick glass as commanded. “Milo, how are they treating you in there?” The former dictator gave Dietrich a blank then a wry look as if insulted by the query.
Dragović looked remarkably unchanged from the day Dietrich killed him. The blood that channeled along his lightning bolt-shaped scar was even in its full glory. The only other defect in his extra corporeal being was the bullet hole in his forehead made by the German’s kill shot in 1991. Moreso than most, Dragović had a fully developed sense of residual self-imaging, no doubt mainly due to his bloated ego.
Most ghosts and spirits show up as black or white masses or indistinct or even deformed in a manner inconsistent with their deaths. Those more abstract entities, it was learned, either didn’t have a defined residual self image from their appearance in life or simply didn’t care about being recognized by maintaining their life image.
“I am treated well,” he finally responded in Russian. “Better than you treated my wife and me. Some of the people here have heard of me.”
Dietrich nodded. By their own admission, some of the entities he’d trapped over the years were very old, some of them allegedly centuries old. But his team had also acquired enough contemporary spirits so that it was guaranteed at least some of them would have heard of Dragović and may perhaps had even admired him.
“I have a proposition for you.” Milo inclined his head in an attitude of curiosity and cynicism. “While I’ve acquired an impressive collection of entities, they are nonetheless an eclectic and fractious lot. I am in need of someone with your oratorical skills to get them all on the same page. That is why I acquired you. You are the man I need.”
That much was true and Dietrich, for once, was speaking with complete veracity. Yet the former Stasi interrogator also knew from years of experience in dealing with political enemies of the state both real and imagined (it never mattered to Dietrich which category they fell into) that hours of torture can actually yield less actionable intelligence and cooperation than can a few words of flattery. It might not have been as entertaining as torture but Hans Dietrich knew good and well, as did millions of others, that Milo Dragović’s greatest source of hubris was his skill in rhetoric.
Turning swords into plowshares was a cliché that didn’t do justice to his oratorical gifts. From the time he improbably seized power in 1971 and turned a regional rump party into a majority powerhouse, Dragović’s fiery, impassioned speeches took the Slavic world by storm even against the not-inconsiderable forces of pre-Communist government loyalists.
“So, you come for help from the man you killed. How ironic.” Dragović’s rich baritone in life was now a raspy sound not unlike dry ice rubbing against itself. But the timber of pragmatism and authority remained. “And why should I help the man who killed my wife and me?”
“First off, I killed you, not your wife. Secondly, you do what I ask of you and I will release you and everyone in here and reunite you with Irina. And you two can go back to haunting the Nesterov Museum and scaring the peasants of Ufa. Thirdly…”
“Yes?” Milo hissed.
“You owe me. You killed my father.”
“What are you talking about?”
“His name was Dr. Fritz Dietrich and he was an East German scientist. Remember when you were Deputy Minister of your country’s bureau of psychic warfare in your intelligence ministry?
“When I was with the Stasi,” he continued through his teeth, “I interrogated a Czech by the name of Dubćek. He admitted placing a psychotronic device on my father during a Communist Party meeting in 1967.” He pulled it out of his front pants pocket and showed it to the dead man. “Look familiar, Milo? This very device allowed a remote assassin somewhere in central Europe to home in on my father. And he died in front of me, my sister and our mother.
“You dispatched that assassin under orders from your Soviet handlers, your future benefactors but you dispatched him, nonetheless.” Dietrich then placed his face against the window so that every word briefly spread fog across it. “Problem: You got the wrong man. Your courier dropped the device in the wrong coat pocket.”
“I do not remember. There were several assassination operations during that time.”
“The one that killed my father was your only failure as Deputy Minister. Of course you remember.”
“I do not.”
“Then if the people pulling your strings didn’t think enough of you to give you the true results, you were a poor stooge of a Politburo that would eventually leave you to twist in the wind. And you will do as I tell you. Otherwise…” Dietrich slid his finger across the disruption bar of the screen, making Dragović writhe in paroxysms of what was obviously agony. “Or I will do this to everyone in there with you and you will suffer the consequences. You will never see Irina ever again and you will spend all of eternity in dire, excruciating pain.” He briefly slid his finger to the right, turning the disruption up to maximum for emphasis. Milo Dragović’s self-referencing residual image largely dissolved into luminescent chaos before Dietrich slid his finger to the left, lowering the disruption to zero megajoules. “And it will feel like that. Do we have a deal?”
Dragović nodded even as he struggled to retain his residual image. “What do you want from me?” Dietrich’s hand fell from the screen as if his arm suddenly went dead and he approached the window again.
“I want you… I want you to unite the dead.”
“Unite them against whom?”
Dietrich smirked and told him.
Chapter 27.
Hans Dietrich took off his black leather trench coat and tossed it on the bare metal desk. Ordinarily, he never wore the thing, anymore. But in keeping with his rare but cruel humor, he wore it to his group’s latest “investigation” at the Nesterov Art Museum in Ufa. It was also the same coat he wore the day he killed his new acquisition- Milo Dragović.
Separating the former Slavic dictator from his wife wasn’t easy. Dietrich knew that acquiring her would be a waste of time and energy. The Olympic silver medalist and former Vice Chairman of the national Communist Party had hated him from the beginning and for good reason. Her cooperation, to say the least, could not be counted on.
There was another reason to leave her behind to haunt the Nesterov Museum- Now separated from her, Dragović’s only chance to be reunited with his wife Irina was to cooperate. It was a promise he made to all those trapped souls: Cooperate and I’ll personally send you and your beloved on to the next world.
How would they know that he lacked both the technology and the inclination to effect that?
Dietrich approached the cottage-sized chamber and touched a readout. From the moment of acquisition, every entity’s unique energy signature was logged into the mainframe and identified by name. Dragović was no exception and it wasn’t difficult to call up that signature and get the former dictator’s attention by disrupting his energy field. The effect across the board was, to ghosts, a sensation akin to what we call physical pain or discomfort.
“Over here, at the window,” Dietrich said to the intercom. As always, the trapped spirits roiled and were restlessly moving like caged panthers. About 50 would appear then phase out of sight to be replaced by the others. All told, Dietrich had collected a menagerie of 117 of the world’s most noxious spirits.
As he waited for Dragović to appear at the large round window, Dietrich amused himself by wondering how well his latest acquisition was getting along with his new playmates. Putting a guy like Dragović in with this bunch was like dropping a soft, wimpy pedophile into a general population made up entirely of murderers and other types that would best be served in a mental institution for the criminally insane. If they chewed him up and spit him out, c’est la vie. Then Dietrich would continue looking for his uniter.
But if he survived this baptism of fire, as it were, so much the better. And the German truly hoped that he could count on Dragović. Hitler would’ve been a more logical not to mention efficacious choice but for some reason he was unavailable. Besides, the dragon of Central Europe owed him.
On the finger touch screen, Dietrich fine-tuned the energy signature finder and locked on before dragging his finger over the control that interrupted Milo’s energy matrix. The speaker was on and when he slid his fingertip over the control, he could hear a cry of pain.
“Milo, come to the window and I’ll stop,” he said in Russian. Eventually, a portly figure emerged from the swirling chaos and went to the three inch-thick glass as commanded. “Milo, how are they treating you in there?” The former dictator gave Dietrich a blank then a wry look as if insulted by the query.
Dragović looked remarkably unchanged from the day Dietrich killed him. The blood that channeled along his lightning bolt-shaped scar was even in its full glory. The only other defect in his extra corporeal being was the bullet hole in his forehead made by the German’s kill shot in 1991. Moreso than most, Dragović had a fully developed sense of residual self-imaging, no doubt mainly due to his bloated ego.
Most ghosts and spirits show up as black or white masses or indistinct or even deformed in a manner inconsistent with their deaths. Those more abstract entities, it was learned, either didn’t have a defined residual self image from their appearance in life or simply didn’t care about being recognized by maintaining their life image.
“I am treated well,” he finally responded in Russian. “Better than you treated my wife and me. Some of the people here have heard of me.”
Dietrich nodded. By their own admission, some of the entities he’d trapped over the years were very old, some of them allegedly centuries old. But his team had also acquired enough contemporary spirits so that it was guaranteed at least some of them would have heard of Dragović and may perhaps had even admired him.
“I have a proposition for you.” Milo inclined his head in an attitude of curiosity and cynicism. “While I’ve acquired an impressive collection of entities, they are nonetheless an eclectic and fractious lot. I am in need of someone with your oratorical skills to get them all on the same page. That is why I acquired you. You are the man I need.”
That much was true and Dietrich, for once, was speaking with complete veracity. Yet the former Stasi interrogator also knew from years of experience in dealing with political enemies of the state both real and imagined (it never mattered to Dietrich which category they fell into) that hours of torture can actually yield less actionable intelligence and cooperation than can a few words of flattery. It might not have been as entertaining as torture but Hans Dietrich knew good and well, as did millions of others, that Milo Dragović’s greatest source of hubris was his skill in rhetoric.
Turning swords into plowshares was a cliché that didn’t do justice to his oratorical gifts. From the time he improbably seized power in 1971 and turned a regional rump party into a majority powerhouse, Dragović’s fiery, impassioned speeches took the Slavic world by storm even against the not-inconsiderable forces of pre-Communist government loyalists.
“So, you come for help from the man you killed. How ironic.” Dragović’s rich baritone in life was now a raspy sound not unlike dry ice rubbing against itself. But the timber of pragmatism and authority remained. “And why should I help the man who killed my wife and me?”
“First off, I killed you, not your wife. Secondly, you do what I ask of you and I will release you and everyone in here and reunite you with Irina. And you two can go back to haunting the Nesterov Museum and scaring the peasants of Ufa. Thirdly…”
“Yes?” Milo hissed.
“You owe me. You killed my father.”
“What are you talking about?”
“His name was Dr. Fritz Dietrich and he was an East German scientist. Remember when you were Deputy Minister of your country’s bureau of psychic warfare in your intelligence ministry?
“When I was with the Stasi,” he continued through his teeth, “I interrogated a Czech by the name of Dubćek. He admitted placing a psychotronic device on my father during a Communist Party meeting in 1967.” He pulled it out of his front pants pocket and showed it to the dead man. “Look familiar, Milo? This very device allowed a remote assassin somewhere in central Europe to home in on my father. And he died in front of me, my sister and our mother.
“You dispatched that assassin under orders from your Soviet handlers, your future benefactors but you dispatched him, nonetheless.” Dietrich then placed his face against the window so that every word briefly spread fog across it. “Problem: You got the wrong man. Your courier dropped the device in the wrong coat pocket.”
“I do not remember. There were several assassination operations during that time.”
“The one that killed my father was your only failure as Deputy Minister. Of course you remember.”
“I do not.”
“Then if the people pulling your strings didn’t think enough of you to give you the true results, you were a poor stooge of a Politburo that would eventually leave you to twist in the wind. And you will do as I tell you. Otherwise…” Dietrich slid his finger across the disruption bar of the screen, making Dragović writhe in paroxysms of what was obviously agony. “Or I will do this to everyone in there with you and you will suffer the consequences. You will never see Irina ever again and you will spend all of eternity in dire, excruciating pain.” He briefly slid his finger to the right, turning the disruption up to maximum for emphasis. Milo Dragović’s self-referencing residual image largely dissolved into luminescent chaos before Dietrich slid his finger to the left, lowering the disruption to zero megajoules. “And it will feel like that. Do we have a deal?”
Dragović nodded even as he struggled to retain his residual image. “What do you want from me?” Dietrich’s hand fell from the screen as if his arm suddenly went dead and he approached the window again.
“I want you… I want you to unite the dead.”
“Unite them against whom?”
Dietrich smirked and told him.
Chapter 27.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
The Bone Bridge- Chapter 25
So there I was, sitting in the shadows like some perv parked next to a playground watching the Moss kid jumping up and down grabbing his family jewels like an organ grinder monkey hopped up on both Viagra and amphetamines. I couldn’t tell if he had to really go or if it was just a ruse to separate himself from his handlers. But if it was just a ruse, the kid deserved an award for live performance art.
Adam ducked into the bathroom then stuck his head back out and looked at the Lincoln then me just as his sister disappeared into the C store. The SUV was between Blood and Adam then the kid took a step toward my car. The look in his eyes told me he desperately wanted to get in with me and I realized that I just as desperately wanted him to get in and away from them. I reached across to unlock the door.
Then his big green eyes got even bigger and he looked back at the Lincoln then the store. Oh, no. Don’t fucking tell me. What could be so Goddamned important that he’d queer an incredible opportunity like this? Sure enough, the dumb little shit started tiptoeing back toward the pumps. Obviously, I couldn’t honk my horn or get out and yell at him. So all I could do was madly gesture behind the steering wheel like a mute Italian cabbie.
From where I was parked, I couldn’t see much into the storefront so I couldn’t tell if Laura had a clear line of sight to the gas pumps and neither could her brother until he exposed himself. He was halfway between me and Blood before he took off in a full sprint and gently opened the back door. What the hell could be so…?
“You’ve gotta be shittin’ me,” I muttered as Adam removed his skateboard and tucked it under his right arm. Leaving the back door open, he started jogging back toward me and that’s when the cow pasture hit the NASA wind tunnel fan.
Laura walked out and called to him. Blood hung up the nozzle and peeked around from the other side. They had him. I turned the ignition key but left the headlights off as Adam said a few words then shook his head and shrugged at his sister. She then dropped the plastic bag she was carrying as she reached for her gun the moment the kid’s board hit the tarmac. He got on and madly one-legged it, aiming himself right at me like a smart bullet.
What happened next was what I call “sudden slow motion.” It was a phenomenon that I’d experienced as a Green Beret, especially during sniping ops. Everything happens abruptly- Hammer hits the cartridge; Gunpowder ignites; Pressure and expanding gases flash out; The crack of the report; The butt against your shoulder as you fire an invisible projectile that makes some unlucky bastard’s head spray pink. It’s all so inhumanly sudden yet so inhumanly slow in retrospect.
For some reason, as Adam’s long blond bangs slowly parted from his face, I thought of one such mission. It was in Bosnia, my last year in the service. I was in the bell tower of a church sighting down on another sniper who was also in an elevated vantage point. He’d been picking off Bosnian civilians for some fucked up reason and the ROE were as simple as simple gets: Shoot to kill and with extreme prejudice.
As a Green Beret, I wasn’t a sniper by trade. Those guys have to train for three years before they can earn the right to include themselves in the same breath as Hathcock, Zaitsev and other sniper legends. But I drew this detail so I saluted, said, “Yes sir” and ran the 12 floors up the bell tower without a spotter, hoping that one of the real snipers would take out this prick.
Then this blond kid comes streaking into the fucking kill zone on a bike without a care in the world. Then he saw the bodies, the blood, the screaming, grieving relatives and did the one thing he never should’ve done- He squeezed his handlebar brakes and stopped to take in the carnage. The exact moment this Bosnian kid had stopped, I saw curtains part just below the bell tower and the end of a black tube poke through.
Time chose that moment to take a terrible siesta. I swiveled my M4 toward the window and fired a millisecond after the tulip of flame burst from the other sniper’s rifle. My bullet knocked the gun out of his hands but when I looked back down at the square, the blond Bosnian kid and his bike lay motionless on their sides. A giant red exclamation point appeared above his once handsome head.
I turned back toward the sniper’s window and without thinking lobbed an M40 grenade from my M203 thumper that was locked to my M4. The survivors on the ground threw up a collective cry of alarm and ran for cover as the exploding room vomited glass, pulverized stone and mortar on them. I didn’t earn a medal for what I’d done nor did I want one. My date of separation was in two weeks and by then I’d had enough. I got out and spent the next four years hoping they wouldn’t IRR my fat ass back into service.
So as the Moss kid began to advance toward me seemingly forever, the Bosnia op flashed through my mind in about one hundredth the time it took to transpire and I chose that moment to marvel at how experiences and memories are never in real time but warped as through some temporal prism. I don’t know why I began thinking of Bosnia. Maybe it was simply the fact that Adam was another blond teenaged boy. Or maybe it was both Laura and Blood drawing their guns and pointing them at his back or at my car as he skated toward me. I slammed the Ford into overdrive as he grabbed the passenger door handle and screamed through the window…
“…Drive!” I couldn’t fuckin’ believe I was doing this and to my own sister. I also couldn’t believe I was yelling orders to a Boston homicide dick. But no way was I gonna leave without my board. Because not only was it the one that Clarissa used the night she died but she bought it for me right after we got discharged from the hospital. And it didn’t come cheap, either. I never described it before so here goes.
It’s an Element brand, considered by some to be the Cadillac of skateboards. It rolls on Blind Reaper 60 mm 97a wheels that are lime green and glow in the dark for both safety and the coolness factor. Clarissa obviously listened to everything I was saying back at the hospital because when I checked it out I discovered that she ordered a 6 ball system in the bearing. Older skateboards used to have an 8 ball system until guys like Tony Hawk taught us acrobatic tricks that put more stress on the bearings. They’d chip and shit, causing kids’ boards to seize up. So some guy got it into his head to develop a 6 ball setup where the balls would be bigger to withstand the added stress. So with the inner and outer races (or tracks), two Daredevil shields to prevent bearing seizures and a 6 ball set up and sliptape that had embossed on it a lime green glow-in-the-dark ghost and maybe you can begin to understand why I just couldn’t leave that board behind.
Now, you and Coffey may still think that getting my board out of the Lincoln was a stupid thing to do. But you have to know how much it means to me. Yeah, it might’ve cost Clarissa a whole month’s allowance. But there’s also such a thing like sentimental value. Even before I started sharpening razors on my wrist, I’d been drooling for a board like that. I talked about my dream board with Clarissa in the psych ward and she got it for my 16th birthday, remembering every detail all the way down to the neon green titanium trucks and the Tail Devil metal plate on the rear.
When Laura came out of the store and asked, “Adam, what the hell are you doing with your skateboard?” I knew the jig was up, as my Dad likes to say.
I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Sorry, Sis. I didn’t sign up for this shit.” Then I dropped my skateboard, got on it and started one-legging it toward Coffey’s car.
So there I was, hanging on to his door handle while I yelled, “Drive!”
I know from having fathered one myself that kids, boys especially, will do stupid things. That’s why teenaged boys have parents and half the reason why society has cops. Being both, I’ve seen teenagers pull shit that would make a lot of people sign up for mandatory sterilization and maybe even lobotomization. But when Adam told me “Drive! Just punch it, dude! I’ve done this before!” I knew that I was not only virtually kidnapping a material witness to a double homicide and a wouldbe federal intelligence asset but also a certified Darwin award nominee.
Fully-vested pension, a 20 year police career to put on my resume, a clean criminal record and sex with my wife outside of a conjugal visit trailer? That’s for wimps.
So I tapped the gas and did little more than crawl out of the gas station while the Moss kid hung on for dear life outside. Then I rolled down the window just before I got to Blood’s rental and shot out the right front tire. I fully expected them to return the favor or to take out my rear windshield and maybe me in the process. But to my relief, neither of them took a shot probably only because of the precious cargo that I was dragging with me.
Once I hit the main drag of whatever town we were in, I was able to speed it up a little as I put some distance between us and Adam’s former handlers. I wanted to find a safe place to pull over so the kid could get in.
Then, as if I hadn’t seen enough, the boy then took his right hand off my door handle, then the left as he freely coasted beside me. And I was doing 35 miles per hour. Then he shifted his weight and veered closer to the sidewalk. His right arm was extended, his hand closed around nothing as if he was being pulled by a tractor beam. He lowered the rear of the board and it began shooting sparks. You’d think the drag would’ve decelerated him but he maintained my 35 mph pace.
Adam then turned to me, tossed his bangs out of his eyes and smiled. It was the first time I’d ever seen him smile and, considering the turns his life had taken, he hadn’t had much reason to these past couple of weeks. I then lowered the passenger window.
“Having fun?” I called out to him, alternating between the road before me and Adam to my right. The kid nodded, that shit-eating grin still on his face. “Pull over and get in.”
Then Adam said, “Stop” and his skateboard automatically began to slow down and the tail of sparks shrank to nothing. However skateboarders slow down or stop, he didn’t have to do any of that. He simply lowered his arms and slowed to a complete halt within ten seconds. I’ve seen my share of strange in both the military and law enforcement but this kid’s already given me the top three on the list.
Once he stopped, the boy kicked his board into his hands and ran to the car. Once he was buckled in, he let out a “Yee-haw!” that would’ve done any shitkicker proud. “God, that was awesome!” he said, his huge green eyes incandescent with excitement.
“Well,” I said as I merged back into traffic, “I’m glad that one of us is having a grand old time tonight. Where now?” I felt like an idiot asking a high schooler what our plan would be, especially since snatching him from his own sister and the federal government was my bright idea. To my surprise, though, he had a ready answer.
“Just keep going straight for now. I’ll tell you where to go. Actually, take this onramp to the exit.”
I took it and got on another highway than the one I’d taken to get to the Mobil. The kid had his eyes glued to a fixed point in the windshield. He was still smiling but it was a gentle, wistful smile.
“Who or what was pulling you back there?”
“The twins,” he said turning to me. “They’re back, dude.” The kid had told me over the phone earlier in the day about some Nazi who killed a set of twins and their parents but it wasn’t until he explained to me in the car that I understood who or what they were. They were a set of twins who were killed in a horrible TC about a year ago. It was outside my jurisdiction but I remembered reading and hearing about it. They’d been National Honor Society students and had just begun their senior year.
Thinking this pair of twins was still alive, I’d meant to ask Adam back at the crime scene where their bodies were until I was interrupted by the territorial Detective Paul Mitchell and the even more territorial Elle Moss and Oliver Blood.
“He tore them up about a dozen new assholes, dude,” he said of Jodl’s attack on the twins. “They were sliced to ribbons and this… shit came out of their wounds. It was like… Okay, have you ever boiled egg whites? You know how it solidifies and gets all rubbery and shit? That’s what their… blood or whatever looked like. Like their guts but not. I dunno…”
When Adam started to interest me as a potential material witness and when the paranormal angle became more and more plausible, I began boning up at home on paranormal science. Like UFO’s and close encounters, I still believe that 90% of what gets reported is bullshit. But this kid and what was gathering around him was definitely in the 10% realm of the unexplained. And what he was describing sounded a lot like ectoplasm, an organic semi-fluid associated with ghosts.
“OK, where to now?”
“I dunno. We’re following her,” he said, pointing out the windshield. I saw nothing but cars in front of me in the distance. We were on a highway heading south toward Connecticut/Rhode Island. Were we supposed to be following one of the cars?
“Who’s ‘she’?”
“Clarissa.” He smiled and waved at our invisible navigator. If it was anyone but Adam sitting next to me, I would’ve driven them straight to Bridgewater State mental hospital. “She’ll guide us.”
“That was a pretty good act you put on back there. You almost had me peeing in my pants.”
“Uh, that wasn’t totally an act, dude. I really do have to go.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before we got on the highway?”
“Sorry, detective. I was distracted,” he said defensively.
I wasn’t too pissed at him because it reminded me of a few back seat emergencies we’d had during road trips when Chaz was alive. I pulled over at a closed-down truck weighing station and the kid ran out to relieve himself.
Oliver Blood slipped the spare over the rotor and began screwing on the lug nuts. The local police answering a call of shots fired were almost waved away by Blood’s unconvincing story of a sudden blow out. When the police wanted to inspect the tire, he and Elle then had broken out the tin and showed their federal credentials. Local cops may be inquisitive but most of them were smart enough to veer off when they were in danger of getting mixed up in affairs well above their pay grade and beyond their parochial jurisdiction.
There were exceptions, however, and Detective Ed Coffey was one of them. Despite being in a silent, blood-boiling rage over both his extra-jurisdictional impudence and the defection by her own flesh and blood, Elle couldn’t help but wonder from where Coffey’s obsession with Adam was stemming. Even before Blood had ordered her to, Elle was already on her cell phone with the analysts back at headquarters digging up everything she could find on Coffey. They sent the file to her Blackberry.
What she learned astonished and worried her.
“Please tell me you planted that bug on him and that it’s still working” Blood said as he tightened up the last lug nut.
“Oh yes. Don’t worry about that, sir. I knew that if he took off, he’d never leave without that skateboard.”
“Good,” her boss said as he released the jack and the weight of the Lincoln was once again on all four wheels. “But even if they find it, we have a backup. Hopefully, Mathilda’s got her A game goin’ tonight.”
Adam ducked into the bathroom then stuck his head back out and looked at the Lincoln then me just as his sister disappeared into the C store. The SUV was between Blood and Adam then the kid took a step toward my car. The look in his eyes told me he desperately wanted to get in with me and I realized that I just as desperately wanted him to get in and away from them. I reached across to unlock the door.
Then his big green eyes got even bigger and he looked back at the Lincoln then the store. Oh, no. Don’t fucking tell me. What could be so Goddamned important that he’d queer an incredible opportunity like this? Sure enough, the dumb little shit started tiptoeing back toward the pumps. Obviously, I couldn’t honk my horn or get out and yell at him. So all I could do was madly gesture behind the steering wheel like a mute Italian cabbie.
From where I was parked, I couldn’t see much into the storefront so I couldn’t tell if Laura had a clear line of sight to the gas pumps and neither could her brother until he exposed himself. He was halfway between me and Blood before he took off in a full sprint and gently opened the back door. What the hell could be so…?
“You’ve gotta be shittin’ me,” I muttered as Adam removed his skateboard and tucked it under his right arm. Leaving the back door open, he started jogging back toward me and that’s when the cow pasture hit the NASA wind tunnel fan.
Laura walked out and called to him. Blood hung up the nozzle and peeked around from the other side. They had him. I turned the ignition key but left the headlights off as Adam said a few words then shook his head and shrugged at his sister. She then dropped the plastic bag she was carrying as she reached for her gun the moment the kid’s board hit the tarmac. He got on and madly one-legged it, aiming himself right at me like a smart bullet.
What happened next was what I call “sudden slow motion.” It was a phenomenon that I’d experienced as a Green Beret, especially during sniping ops. Everything happens abruptly- Hammer hits the cartridge; Gunpowder ignites; Pressure and expanding gases flash out; The crack of the report; The butt against your shoulder as you fire an invisible projectile that makes some unlucky bastard’s head spray pink. It’s all so inhumanly sudden yet so inhumanly slow in retrospect.
For some reason, as Adam’s long blond bangs slowly parted from his face, I thought of one such mission. It was in Bosnia, my last year in the service. I was in the bell tower of a church sighting down on another sniper who was also in an elevated vantage point. He’d been picking off Bosnian civilians for some fucked up reason and the ROE were as simple as simple gets: Shoot to kill and with extreme prejudice.
As a Green Beret, I wasn’t a sniper by trade. Those guys have to train for three years before they can earn the right to include themselves in the same breath as Hathcock, Zaitsev and other sniper legends. But I drew this detail so I saluted, said, “Yes sir” and ran the 12 floors up the bell tower without a spotter, hoping that one of the real snipers would take out this prick.
Then this blond kid comes streaking into the fucking kill zone on a bike without a care in the world. Then he saw the bodies, the blood, the screaming, grieving relatives and did the one thing he never should’ve done- He squeezed his handlebar brakes and stopped to take in the carnage. The exact moment this Bosnian kid had stopped, I saw curtains part just below the bell tower and the end of a black tube poke through.
Time chose that moment to take a terrible siesta. I swiveled my M4 toward the window and fired a millisecond after the tulip of flame burst from the other sniper’s rifle. My bullet knocked the gun out of his hands but when I looked back down at the square, the blond Bosnian kid and his bike lay motionless on their sides. A giant red exclamation point appeared above his once handsome head.
I turned back toward the sniper’s window and without thinking lobbed an M40 grenade from my M203 thumper that was locked to my M4. The survivors on the ground threw up a collective cry of alarm and ran for cover as the exploding room vomited glass, pulverized stone and mortar on them. I didn’t earn a medal for what I’d done nor did I want one. My date of separation was in two weeks and by then I’d had enough. I got out and spent the next four years hoping they wouldn’t IRR my fat ass back into service.
So as the Moss kid began to advance toward me seemingly forever, the Bosnia op flashed through my mind in about one hundredth the time it took to transpire and I chose that moment to marvel at how experiences and memories are never in real time but warped as through some temporal prism. I don’t know why I began thinking of Bosnia. Maybe it was simply the fact that Adam was another blond teenaged boy. Or maybe it was both Laura and Blood drawing their guns and pointing them at his back or at my car as he skated toward me. I slammed the Ford into overdrive as he grabbed the passenger door handle and screamed through the window…
“…Drive!” I couldn’t fuckin’ believe I was doing this and to my own sister. I also couldn’t believe I was yelling orders to a Boston homicide dick. But no way was I gonna leave without my board. Because not only was it the one that Clarissa used the night she died but she bought it for me right after we got discharged from the hospital. And it didn’t come cheap, either. I never described it before so here goes.
It’s an Element brand, considered by some to be the Cadillac of skateboards. It rolls on Blind Reaper 60 mm 97a wheels that are lime green and glow in the dark for both safety and the coolness factor. Clarissa obviously listened to everything I was saying back at the hospital because when I checked it out I discovered that she ordered a 6 ball system in the bearing. Older skateboards used to have an 8 ball system until guys like Tony Hawk taught us acrobatic tricks that put more stress on the bearings. They’d chip and shit, causing kids’ boards to seize up. So some guy got it into his head to develop a 6 ball setup where the balls would be bigger to withstand the added stress. So with the inner and outer races (or tracks), two Daredevil shields to prevent bearing seizures and a 6 ball set up and sliptape that had embossed on it a lime green glow-in-the-dark ghost and maybe you can begin to understand why I just couldn’t leave that board behind.
Now, you and Coffey may still think that getting my board out of the Lincoln was a stupid thing to do. But you have to know how much it means to me. Yeah, it might’ve cost Clarissa a whole month’s allowance. But there’s also such a thing like sentimental value. Even before I started sharpening razors on my wrist, I’d been drooling for a board like that. I talked about my dream board with Clarissa in the psych ward and she got it for my 16th birthday, remembering every detail all the way down to the neon green titanium trucks and the Tail Devil metal plate on the rear.
When Laura came out of the store and asked, “Adam, what the hell are you doing with your skateboard?” I knew the jig was up, as my Dad likes to say.
I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Sorry, Sis. I didn’t sign up for this shit.” Then I dropped my skateboard, got on it and started one-legging it toward Coffey’s car.
So there I was, hanging on to his door handle while I yelled, “Drive!”
I know from having fathered one myself that kids, boys especially, will do stupid things. That’s why teenaged boys have parents and half the reason why society has cops. Being both, I’ve seen teenagers pull shit that would make a lot of people sign up for mandatory sterilization and maybe even lobotomization. But when Adam told me “Drive! Just punch it, dude! I’ve done this before!” I knew that I was not only virtually kidnapping a material witness to a double homicide and a wouldbe federal intelligence asset but also a certified Darwin award nominee.
Fully-vested pension, a 20 year police career to put on my resume, a clean criminal record and sex with my wife outside of a conjugal visit trailer? That’s for wimps.
So I tapped the gas and did little more than crawl out of the gas station while the Moss kid hung on for dear life outside. Then I rolled down the window just before I got to Blood’s rental and shot out the right front tire. I fully expected them to return the favor or to take out my rear windshield and maybe me in the process. But to my relief, neither of them took a shot probably only because of the precious cargo that I was dragging with me.
Once I hit the main drag of whatever town we were in, I was able to speed it up a little as I put some distance between us and Adam’s former handlers. I wanted to find a safe place to pull over so the kid could get in.
Then, as if I hadn’t seen enough, the boy then took his right hand off my door handle, then the left as he freely coasted beside me. And I was doing 35 miles per hour. Then he shifted his weight and veered closer to the sidewalk. His right arm was extended, his hand closed around nothing as if he was being pulled by a tractor beam. He lowered the rear of the board and it began shooting sparks. You’d think the drag would’ve decelerated him but he maintained my 35 mph pace.
Adam then turned to me, tossed his bangs out of his eyes and smiled. It was the first time I’d ever seen him smile and, considering the turns his life had taken, he hadn’t had much reason to these past couple of weeks. I then lowered the passenger window.
“Having fun?” I called out to him, alternating between the road before me and Adam to my right. The kid nodded, that shit-eating grin still on his face. “Pull over and get in.”
Then Adam said, “Stop” and his skateboard automatically began to slow down and the tail of sparks shrank to nothing. However skateboarders slow down or stop, he didn’t have to do any of that. He simply lowered his arms and slowed to a complete halt within ten seconds. I’ve seen my share of strange in both the military and law enforcement but this kid’s already given me the top three on the list.
Once he stopped, the boy kicked his board into his hands and ran to the car. Once he was buckled in, he let out a “Yee-haw!” that would’ve done any shitkicker proud. “God, that was awesome!” he said, his huge green eyes incandescent with excitement.
“Well,” I said as I merged back into traffic, “I’m glad that one of us is having a grand old time tonight. Where now?” I felt like an idiot asking a high schooler what our plan would be, especially since snatching him from his own sister and the federal government was my bright idea. To my surprise, though, he had a ready answer.
“Just keep going straight for now. I’ll tell you where to go. Actually, take this onramp to the exit.”
I took it and got on another highway than the one I’d taken to get to the Mobil. The kid had his eyes glued to a fixed point in the windshield. He was still smiling but it was a gentle, wistful smile.
“Who or what was pulling you back there?”
“The twins,” he said turning to me. “They’re back, dude.” The kid had told me over the phone earlier in the day about some Nazi who killed a set of twins and their parents but it wasn’t until he explained to me in the car that I understood who or what they were. They were a set of twins who were killed in a horrible TC about a year ago. It was outside my jurisdiction but I remembered reading and hearing about it. They’d been National Honor Society students and had just begun their senior year.
Thinking this pair of twins was still alive, I’d meant to ask Adam back at the crime scene where their bodies were until I was interrupted by the territorial Detective Paul Mitchell and the even more territorial Elle Moss and Oliver Blood.
“He tore them up about a dozen new assholes, dude,” he said of Jodl’s attack on the twins. “They were sliced to ribbons and this… shit came out of their wounds. It was like… Okay, have you ever boiled egg whites? You know how it solidifies and gets all rubbery and shit? That’s what their… blood or whatever looked like. Like their guts but not. I dunno…”
When Adam started to interest me as a potential material witness and when the paranormal angle became more and more plausible, I began boning up at home on paranormal science. Like UFO’s and close encounters, I still believe that 90% of what gets reported is bullshit. But this kid and what was gathering around him was definitely in the 10% realm of the unexplained. And what he was describing sounded a lot like ectoplasm, an organic semi-fluid associated with ghosts.
“OK, where to now?”
“I dunno. We’re following her,” he said, pointing out the windshield. I saw nothing but cars in front of me in the distance. We were on a highway heading south toward Connecticut/Rhode Island. Were we supposed to be following one of the cars?
“Who’s ‘she’?”
“Clarissa.” He smiled and waved at our invisible navigator. If it was anyone but Adam sitting next to me, I would’ve driven them straight to Bridgewater State mental hospital. “She’ll guide us.”
“That was a pretty good act you put on back there. You almost had me peeing in my pants.”
“Uh, that wasn’t totally an act, dude. I really do have to go.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before we got on the highway?”
“Sorry, detective. I was distracted,” he said defensively.
I wasn’t too pissed at him because it reminded me of a few back seat emergencies we’d had during road trips when Chaz was alive. I pulled over at a closed-down truck weighing station and the kid ran out to relieve himself.
Oliver Blood slipped the spare over the rotor and began screwing on the lug nuts. The local police answering a call of shots fired were almost waved away by Blood’s unconvincing story of a sudden blow out. When the police wanted to inspect the tire, he and Elle then had broken out the tin and showed their federal credentials. Local cops may be inquisitive but most of them were smart enough to veer off when they were in danger of getting mixed up in affairs well above their pay grade and beyond their parochial jurisdiction.
There were exceptions, however, and Detective Ed Coffey was one of them. Despite being in a silent, blood-boiling rage over both his extra-jurisdictional impudence and the defection by her own flesh and blood, Elle couldn’t help but wonder from where Coffey’s obsession with Adam was stemming. Even before Blood had ordered her to, Elle was already on her cell phone with the analysts back at headquarters digging up everything she could find on Coffey. They sent the file to her Blackberry.
What she learned astonished and worried her.
“Please tell me you planted that bug on him and that it’s still working” Blood said as he tightened up the last lug nut.
“Oh yes. Don’t worry about that, sir. I knew that if he took off, he’d never leave without that skateboard.”
“Good,” her boss said as he released the jack and the weight of the Lincoln was once again on all four wheels. “But even if they find it, we have a backup. Hopefully, Mathilda’s got her A game goin’ tonight.”
The Bone Bridge- Chapter 24
“What’s A.D.E.P.T.?” I asked either Laura or Blood. For the first time, they said the name of their super duper, triple secret spy outfit.
“It stands for Allied Defense of Existing or Emerging Paranormal Technologies,” Blood said as he drove into the night.
“So wouldn’t that be A.D.E.E.P.T.?” Laura gave me the stink eye.
“‘Existing’ and ‘Emerging’ are interchangeable or optional. The point is, we’re in existence partly to prevent certain research and development like our grandfather’s work from being perverted and exploited.”
“And our job isn’t just chasing ghosts around and keeping them from being exploited,” Blood added. “It’s also our job to keep psychic research from falling into the wrong hands.”
“Ghosts and psychics,” I said under my breath. “Man, you guys must have some real interesting office Christmas parties.”
“Are you sure you didn’t recognize any of the ghosts at the Ritz Carlton, Adam?” Blood had already grilled me twice with that question and I was already beginning to regret using that as a decoy tactic to divert attention away from Coffey. I think that Blood was hoping some of them were from that massive clusterfuck on Halloween and that some of them told me what went down that night.
“No, dude, I already told you. I never saw ‘em in my life. Most of the ones I see are strangers, to begin with.”
“I was wondering if they were Congressman and Mrs. Feingold or anyone else from the party. A lot of ‘em were famous people. I was hopin’ you’d recognize some of them or if they spoke to you about what happened.”
“Naw, sorry, dude. Nuthin’ like that. They were, like, just random.”
I looked over at Laura and she looked back at me real sketchy, like she didn’t know whether or not I was bullshitting her. Remember, I said earlier that it’s almost impossible for even an accomplished liar like me to fool her.
I fought wicked hard not to look out the rear windshield to see if Coffey was following us. But somehow I knew he was.
In nine years as a patrol cop and seven as a homicide detective, I don’t recall ever having to tail someone. At the academy, they taught us pursuit and evasive maneuvers but not how to tail a suspect during a low speed pursuit. Homicide dicks generally don’t work undercover like the Serpico wannabes in Narcotics so discretion’s not among our strong suits. And I’m definitely no exception.
Lucky for me this Oliver Blood character rented just about the most conspicuous fucking SUV in the Western Hemisphere. I was pretty sure he’d arrived alone at Logan airport but by renting a Lincoln Navigator, it was almost as if he was planning on taking back with him the entire defensive squad of the New England Patriots. Earlier on, I ran the plates through the RMV and got it confirmed that it was rented to an Oliver R. Blood at the Hertz rental counter at Logan three days ago and paid for with a government-issued credit card.
That’s right. The arrogant prick actually used his own name right down to the middle initial. What intelligence agency head does that and how many others would be this hands-on about it?
Once they boarded their plane, however, I had no fucking idea how I was going to get on without being seen by Blood or the Moss girl, especially if Blood took a smaller private jet. I had even less of a plan for sneaking into their headquarters even if I could follow them that far.
“Goddamned 30 cylinder piece of shit. Passes everything but a Goddamned gas station,” Oliver Blood muttered as he flicked the plexiglassed fuel gauge with his thick index finger even though it was an LED readout.
They still had miles to go but Blood just noticed the computer telling him he had only about thirty miles of gas at their present rate of consumption. It was half-full when he rented it therefore he had to return it half-full. The new DNI’s bean counters and hatchet men were all over him every month as it was for his agency’s discretionary spending.
“We have to get gas?” Laura asked as she leaned toward the front seat.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t planning on stopping. ‘S my fault. I shoulda checked the damned gauge.”
Blood drove deeper into the night until he lowered his head and noted an exit sign indicating gas stations, restaurants and a motel. Within minutes he turned off the highway.
The Lincoln got in the breakdown lane and the right directional began blinking just shy of the exit. I thought I’d been made, even though I stayed 2-3 car lengths behind. They may’ve been trying to shake me off it could’ve simply been that Blood had to get gas before returning the rental. Then again, anyone who’s ever seen a bad cop or spy movie knows the best way to flush out a tail is to take an exit or make a long series of turns in secluded areas. More often than not, it’ll remove what few cars that remain between you and your tail. Luckily, a guy in a fat-ass Ford S-series pickup ahead of me kept himself between Blood’s Navigator and me. Plus, the sign back on the highway promised gas and other services.
The whole time I was with my sister and Blood, I tried to scope out things in the rear view mirror. But when Blood began turning on that exit ramp, whoever was behind us couldn’t be seen because we were turning. So I had no clue if Coffey was behind us.
During the trip from the hotel I started freaking myself out over what Laura and her boss both told me and didn’t tell me. They hadn’t come out to tell me about the adepts, the others like me that they wanted me to meet. That shit I had to find out with the playback from the digital audio recorder that Ramon got me for my birthday.
That alone put me in a really crappy position. I knew I couldn’t trust Blood as far as I could throw my high school. What made me feel lower than mole shit was not being able to trust my own sister. We might not always have been cool to each other growing up but I never had any reason to distrust her. With this new bullshit since the accident, since Clarissa died, all that’s changed.
Hell, I wasn’t even 100% sure if I could trust that Coffey cop. For all I knew, maybe he was just using me to solve his own case but I never really believed that. If I didn’t actually trust him with my own life, I felt like I could, you know? It was easy for even a kid like me to see that he was a Dad, probably someone with a kid my own age. And he would look at me sometimes like my real Dad does during cool moments when we aren’t wising off to each other.
All the same, while I trusted Coffey more than my own sister, it was pretty obvious that they weren’t giving me the full four one one. Even though I asked both Coffey and Laura how those people got croaked on Halloween, they either told me that I didn’t wanna know and that it was best I didn’t or that that some of those hoity toity types jumped.
Well, yeah. A lot of them got squashed on the sidewalk. The news kept telling me that but what no one was telling me was why they jumped. I mean, it’s not every day that a bunch of rich fucks decide to go urban sky diving without parachutes.
But considering that Laura’s secret agent pals took my parents and me into protective custody and what had just gone down at the Christiansons’ house, it obviously wasn’t anything routine like a serial killer or terrorists.
Basically, the so-called grownups were keeping little Adam in the dark and that fucking pissed me off to no end. I’m 18, now, and I’ll be out of high school in 6 months. I think I’m old enough to handle the truth. After all, I saw the ghost of a Nazi doctor off two people and their dead daughters, to boot. How do I know that he wasn’t involved in the Halloween massacre?
Blood pulled into a Mobil station and got out when he realized that no gas attendant was coming out. He slipped a card in and out of the pump and started gassing up. I took a chance and looked at both the rear and side view mirrors and saw Coffey stop next to a car vacuum machine about 50 feet behind us.
“Laura, can you get me an ice coffee? I don’t have any money.”
“Can’t you wait? We’ll be on the plane soon. It’s a private jet.”
“C’mon, Sis, that’ll take hours. ‘Sides, I gotta pee like a racehorse. And we’re here, already.”
She looked at the store on our right then at Oliver, who still hadn’t even pumped five bucks.
“My boss gave me explicit instructions not to leave you alone for even a nanosecond.”
“He’s fuckin’ right out there! ‘Sides, where am I gonna run to? You guys are all I got for protection and transportation.” For extra credit, I even squirmed and grabbed my crotch. “Laura, don’t you remember what happened about six years ago when Mom and Dad took us to the Cape?”
Her eyes got wide then narrowed as she grimly nodded her head. I was still 12 and couldn’t hold it in. By the time we got to the Sagamore Bridge, I’d started peeing in my pants. Dad couldn’t just stop on the bridge and the only container we had was the empty liter Pepsi bottle that caused the crisis. In a panic, Laura reached down and threw the bottle at me and looked real hard out her window as I began peeing into it.
But the worst part was when I forgot to vent the opening and the backed-up air pressure made my piss spray out all over the car. Poor Laura, Dad and I got a golden shower and I even got the back of my Mom’s hair.
I raised my eyebrows at Laura and she looked around the interior of this nice, clean SUV then back out at Oliver.
“Are you sure you can’t wait to get back to Logan?”
“You really haven’t learned much from the government about water and air displacement, have you?” I grabbed my dick again.
“Alright, alright. Just stop touching yourself down there.” She opened the passenger side back door and said, “You know I love you, Bro, but there’s always going to be a grossness factor with you.”
“Thank you, Big Sister,” I said as I slid out.
“Oliver, Adam’s gotta use the bathroom.” We heard the nozzle stop and Blood came out from behind the SUV.
“Are you gonna go in with him?” he asked in a real smart-assed way.
“Well, obviously not, sir.”
“Then you’ll wait until I’m done here,” he said to us. I looked at Laura as I did a little Irish jig. Man, even taking a piss with these guys is like planning fucking D Day. Now I know what Congressman Feingold meant when he told me one time that our government moves more slowly than molasses running uphill in January.
“Uh, sir, trust me. That’s not a good idea. My kid brother’s got a bladder the size of a ping pong ball.” I nodded at Blood for emphasis.
“Well, I can’t go in with him. I gotta do this. Unless you want to trade,” he said gesturing at the pump.
“Shit, I think I just spritzed a little in my pants…”
“Damnit, hurry up!” I could tell his patience with me was wearing thin. Coffey, like I already said, was a Dad. Blood? No way. Never was, never will be. He doesn’t have the blood pressure for it, pardon the pun.
“Wait here. I’ll get the key.”
“No, it’s open. I just saw someone walk out and they didn’t have a key.” I started jogging to the bathroom.
“You better be out before me. I don’t care how full your bladder is.”
I got to the bathroom door just as Laura went into the store then at Blood. He peeked out from behind the Navigator and I stepped into the bathroom for just a minute. Then I stuck my head out and looked right at Coffey then at the Lincoln. Blood went back to what he was doing. I took a step toward Coffey’s car then remembered leaving something in the back seat of the SUV. And no fuckin’ way was I taking off without it.
“It stands for Allied Defense of Existing or Emerging Paranormal Technologies,” Blood said as he drove into the night.
“So wouldn’t that be A.D.E.E.P.T.?” Laura gave me the stink eye.
“‘Existing’ and ‘Emerging’ are interchangeable or optional. The point is, we’re in existence partly to prevent certain research and development like our grandfather’s work from being perverted and exploited.”
“And our job isn’t just chasing ghosts around and keeping them from being exploited,” Blood added. “It’s also our job to keep psychic research from falling into the wrong hands.”
“Ghosts and psychics,” I said under my breath. “Man, you guys must have some real interesting office Christmas parties.”
“Are you sure you didn’t recognize any of the ghosts at the Ritz Carlton, Adam?” Blood had already grilled me twice with that question and I was already beginning to regret using that as a decoy tactic to divert attention away from Coffey. I think that Blood was hoping some of them were from that massive clusterfuck on Halloween and that some of them told me what went down that night.
“No, dude, I already told you. I never saw ‘em in my life. Most of the ones I see are strangers, to begin with.”
“I was wondering if they were Congressman and Mrs. Feingold or anyone else from the party. A lot of ‘em were famous people. I was hopin’ you’d recognize some of them or if they spoke to you about what happened.”
“Naw, sorry, dude. Nuthin’ like that. They were, like, just random.”
I looked over at Laura and she looked back at me real sketchy, like she didn’t know whether or not I was bullshitting her. Remember, I said earlier that it’s almost impossible for even an accomplished liar like me to fool her.
I fought wicked hard not to look out the rear windshield to see if Coffey was following us. But somehow I knew he was.
In nine years as a patrol cop and seven as a homicide detective, I don’t recall ever having to tail someone. At the academy, they taught us pursuit and evasive maneuvers but not how to tail a suspect during a low speed pursuit. Homicide dicks generally don’t work undercover like the Serpico wannabes in Narcotics so discretion’s not among our strong suits. And I’m definitely no exception.
Lucky for me this Oliver Blood character rented just about the most conspicuous fucking SUV in the Western Hemisphere. I was pretty sure he’d arrived alone at Logan airport but by renting a Lincoln Navigator, it was almost as if he was planning on taking back with him the entire defensive squad of the New England Patriots. Earlier on, I ran the plates through the RMV and got it confirmed that it was rented to an Oliver R. Blood at the Hertz rental counter at Logan three days ago and paid for with a government-issued credit card.
That’s right. The arrogant prick actually used his own name right down to the middle initial. What intelligence agency head does that and how many others would be this hands-on about it?
Once they boarded their plane, however, I had no fucking idea how I was going to get on without being seen by Blood or the Moss girl, especially if Blood took a smaller private jet. I had even less of a plan for sneaking into their headquarters even if I could follow them that far.
“Goddamned 30 cylinder piece of shit. Passes everything but a Goddamned gas station,” Oliver Blood muttered as he flicked the plexiglassed fuel gauge with his thick index finger even though it was an LED readout.
They still had miles to go but Blood just noticed the computer telling him he had only about thirty miles of gas at their present rate of consumption. It was half-full when he rented it therefore he had to return it half-full. The new DNI’s bean counters and hatchet men were all over him every month as it was for his agency’s discretionary spending.
“We have to get gas?” Laura asked as she leaned toward the front seat.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t planning on stopping. ‘S my fault. I shoulda checked the damned gauge.”
Blood drove deeper into the night until he lowered his head and noted an exit sign indicating gas stations, restaurants and a motel. Within minutes he turned off the highway.
The Lincoln got in the breakdown lane and the right directional began blinking just shy of the exit. I thought I’d been made, even though I stayed 2-3 car lengths behind. They may’ve been trying to shake me off it could’ve simply been that Blood had to get gas before returning the rental. Then again, anyone who’s ever seen a bad cop or spy movie knows the best way to flush out a tail is to take an exit or make a long series of turns in secluded areas. More often than not, it’ll remove what few cars that remain between you and your tail. Luckily, a guy in a fat-ass Ford S-series pickup ahead of me kept himself between Blood’s Navigator and me. Plus, the sign back on the highway promised gas and other services.
The whole time I was with my sister and Blood, I tried to scope out things in the rear view mirror. But when Blood began turning on that exit ramp, whoever was behind us couldn’t be seen because we were turning. So I had no clue if Coffey was behind us.
During the trip from the hotel I started freaking myself out over what Laura and her boss both told me and didn’t tell me. They hadn’t come out to tell me about the adepts, the others like me that they wanted me to meet. That shit I had to find out with the playback from the digital audio recorder that Ramon got me for my birthday.
That alone put me in a really crappy position. I knew I couldn’t trust Blood as far as I could throw my high school. What made me feel lower than mole shit was not being able to trust my own sister. We might not always have been cool to each other growing up but I never had any reason to distrust her. With this new bullshit since the accident, since Clarissa died, all that’s changed.
Hell, I wasn’t even 100% sure if I could trust that Coffey cop. For all I knew, maybe he was just using me to solve his own case but I never really believed that. If I didn’t actually trust him with my own life, I felt like I could, you know? It was easy for even a kid like me to see that he was a Dad, probably someone with a kid my own age. And he would look at me sometimes like my real Dad does during cool moments when we aren’t wising off to each other.
All the same, while I trusted Coffey more than my own sister, it was pretty obvious that they weren’t giving me the full four one one. Even though I asked both Coffey and Laura how those people got croaked on Halloween, they either told me that I didn’t wanna know and that it was best I didn’t or that that some of those hoity toity types jumped.
Well, yeah. A lot of them got squashed on the sidewalk. The news kept telling me that but what no one was telling me was why they jumped. I mean, it’s not every day that a bunch of rich fucks decide to go urban sky diving without parachutes.
But considering that Laura’s secret agent pals took my parents and me into protective custody and what had just gone down at the Christiansons’ house, it obviously wasn’t anything routine like a serial killer or terrorists.
Basically, the so-called grownups were keeping little Adam in the dark and that fucking pissed me off to no end. I’m 18, now, and I’ll be out of high school in 6 months. I think I’m old enough to handle the truth. After all, I saw the ghost of a Nazi doctor off two people and their dead daughters, to boot. How do I know that he wasn’t involved in the Halloween massacre?
Blood pulled into a Mobil station and got out when he realized that no gas attendant was coming out. He slipped a card in and out of the pump and started gassing up. I took a chance and looked at both the rear and side view mirrors and saw Coffey stop next to a car vacuum machine about 50 feet behind us.
“Laura, can you get me an ice coffee? I don’t have any money.”
“Can’t you wait? We’ll be on the plane soon. It’s a private jet.”
“C’mon, Sis, that’ll take hours. ‘Sides, I gotta pee like a racehorse. And we’re here, already.”
She looked at the store on our right then at Oliver, who still hadn’t even pumped five bucks.
“My boss gave me explicit instructions not to leave you alone for even a nanosecond.”
“He’s fuckin’ right out there! ‘Sides, where am I gonna run to? You guys are all I got for protection and transportation.” For extra credit, I even squirmed and grabbed my crotch. “Laura, don’t you remember what happened about six years ago when Mom and Dad took us to the Cape?”
Her eyes got wide then narrowed as she grimly nodded her head. I was still 12 and couldn’t hold it in. By the time we got to the Sagamore Bridge, I’d started peeing in my pants. Dad couldn’t just stop on the bridge and the only container we had was the empty liter Pepsi bottle that caused the crisis. In a panic, Laura reached down and threw the bottle at me and looked real hard out her window as I began peeing into it.
But the worst part was when I forgot to vent the opening and the backed-up air pressure made my piss spray out all over the car. Poor Laura, Dad and I got a golden shower and I even got the back of my Mom’s hair.
I raised my eyebrows at Laura and she looked around the interior of this nice, clean SUV then back out at Oliver.
“Are you sure you can’t wait to get back to Logan?”
“You really haven’t learned much from the government about water and air displacement, have you?” I grabbed my dick again.
“Alright, alright. Just stop touching yourself down there.” She opened the passenger side back door and said, “You know I love you, Bro, but there’s always going to be a grossness factor with you.”
“Thank you, Big Sister,” I said as I slid out.
“Oliver, Adam’s gotta use the bathroom.” We heard the nozzle stop and Blood came out from behind the SUV.
“Are you gonna go in with him?” he asked in a real smart-assed way.
“Well, obviously not, sir.”
“Then you’ll wait until I’m done here,” he said to us. I looked at Laura as I did a little Irish jig. Man, even taking a piss with these guys is like planning fucking D Day. Now I know what Congressman Feingold meant when he told me one time that our government moves more slowly than molasses running uphill in January.
“Uh, sir, trust me. That’s not a good idea. My kid brother’s got a bladder the size of a ping pong ball.” I nodded at Blood for emphasis.
“Well, I can’t go in with him. I gotta do this. Unless you want to trade,” he said gesturing at the pump.
“Shit, I think I just spritzed a little in my pants…”
“Damnit, hurry up!” I could tell his patience with me was wearing thin. Coffey, like I already said, was a Dad. Blood? No way. Never was, never will be. He doesn’t have the blood pressure for it, pardon the pun.
“Wait here. I’ll get the key.”
“No, it’s open. I just saw someone walk out and they didn’t have a key.” I started jogging to the bathroom.
“You better be out before me. I don’t care how full your bladder is.”
I got to the bathroom door just as Laura went into the store then at Blood. He peeked out from behind the Navigator and I stepped into the bathroom for just a minute. Then I stuck my head out and looked right at Coffey then at the Lincoln. Blood went back to what he was doing. I took a step toward Coffey’s car then remembered leaving something in the back seat of the SUV. And no fuckin’ way was I taking off without it.
The Bone Bridge- Chapter 23
(Ufa, Russian Federation, December 1991)
Milo Dragović’s onetime contemporary Ronald Reagan wasn’t the only leader called “the Great Communicator.” While Reagan swaggered through Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union was already on one knee, symbolically telling an absent Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!” his own countrymen were united through his sheer oratorical skills.
Now, 1000 miles from his native country, his breath exploding from his gaping mouth like an assembly line of ghosts, he slipped on slush as he ran for his life. His younger wife was in better shape- Back home, she jogged five kilometers daily. But she was no less scared than he; She just refused to show it.
How could they turn on him so fast?
His people, as always, were united but now against him. What initiatives and policies that had served so admirably well for 11 years were now suddenly, with the collapse of the Iron Curtain, out of vogue. Sure, prosperity could’ve been better, it always can be, but his people were still better off than they were in 1980. Who cared about 2000 political enemies getting “disappeared” or “re-educated”?
The clergy and damned human rights groups, for starters, plus the Soviet Politburo’s slow but sure withdrawal of any support. Still, how could the people turn on him so damned quickly?
On, on, his wife exhorted him and Milo Dragović’s 69 year-old body struggled to move at even his present crab-like pace. His lungs felt thick and the colder the air of Ufa grew, the more they burned. Eleven years of hiding in the presidential palace had made him as soft as a dumpling.
On, on, Irina’s shoves and tugs told him and his leaden legs somehow kept moving. They were finally exposed but they also knew they had to leave the armored BMW when their chauffer and last remaining bodyguard was killed. Neither of them knew how to drive so it was either stay in the car and wait for the sniper to find them with his armor-piercing rounds or become moving targets.
Dragović stopped and put his pudgy hands on his aching knees, his breath now ragged wheezes.
“Go. I’m… just holding you back.”
“Where you go, I go.” She kneeled down and looked into his gray eyes with her pale blue ones. Unlike Dragović, she was a pure Russian and as such was equal parts of all four elements, each one more untamed and irresistible than the last. She wasn’t a human being at the mercy of nature but a force of nature unto herself.
“Then we will both die,” he gasped. His lungs burned less with the respite even though they still felt like half-filled sandbags. “At least if we separate… you have a chance.”
“You will not talk like this,” she said. “I will not listen to you when you talk like this. If you die, we die.” For emphasis, Irina pulled from her sable coat’s right pocket a 7.62 X 25 mm Tokarev that she took off one of their dead bodyguards. 19 years ago, Irina Svetyana was a silver medal-winning biathlete for the Soviet delegation at the Sapporo Winter Olympics. Now 40, her only concession to her age was the severity in her demeanor and in her cheekbones owing to some very good plastic surgery. “Now move, my love. Move.”
He drew himself to his full height of 5 feet, 8 inches and took a couple of exploratory steps. His ample legs felt as if they were made of rubber but at least the burning in his lungs was slightly mitigated. He began trotting, his wife’s iron arm locked in his to keep him from losing his balance and footing in the snow clogged streets.
Presently, they came upon the Nesterov Art Museum on ul Gogolya west of the main street. Ufa was renowned for being a far-flung but cosmopolitan city with a strong bent for science and the humanities. The Nesterov Art Museum was known even in Moscow and Dragović’s native country as a must-see destination for any tourist in Ufa. He looked at the imperial-style eight columns and cheerful yellow paint job, the modest but still-imposing steps. Well, when in Rome…
Even as they entered the building, they donned sunglasses as they paid their admission. Still, sunglasses couldn’t hide the distinctive scar on Dragović’s right cheek, the one shaped exactly like a lightning bolt earned during his nation’s civil war in 1969.
Instinctively, Irina and Milo embedded themselves in the biggest crowds, all the while scanning their environment of anyone even remotely suspicious. But after today, with all four of their bodyguards picked off one by one and in broad daylight, their justified paranoia made weeding out the nonsuspicious much more inclusive. There’d been horrified witnesses, sure, but since Milo and Irina were obviously the real targets, the better half of human valor made for very few Good Samaritans. Which was fine by them. The last thing they needed was to be discovered and held in custody by the Ufa police. That’s how they got Nicolae Ceausescu and his own wife when they tried to flee two years ago.
Milo took a break from his paranoid search and lowered his sunglasses to admire a 15th century Russian icon. He was already ahead of the game compared with Ceausescu, Hitler and Mussolini. Ceausescu was machine gunned minutes after a two hour show trial on a military base, Hitler died in a bunker and Mussolini was also machine gunned then hung upside down like a side of beef at an abandoned gas station.
And their women also died with them, he darkly concluded.
If anyone had walked into the museum carrying a sniper rifle, the crowd could be counted on to raise a cry of alarm. So far, nothing but the usual hubbub of typical art aficionados like Dragović.
But in the end, he knew that as much as the caprices of their eagle-eyed hunter, what kept him alive was Irina. Ufa was her native city and she knew most of the streets and alleyways.
The couple let themselves be swept into a tour group. Both knew Russian fluently and they learned from snatches of conversation that they took a train from neighboring Samara to tour Ufa. Then Milo saw Irina lower her sunglasses, her right hand shifting in her matching sable muff. Following her line of vision, he saw a tall, very heavily-muscled man, possibly German, standing at an exit. His eyes radiated cruelty as he slowly began to advance on them.
Irina was about to pull out the Tokarev but Milo held her hand and shook his head. “This way,” he murmured as he pulled her away from the blonde giant.
Still believing in safety in numbers, Milo drifted with Irina to a smaller and looser knot of people until he, too, saw someone walking toward them from another exit. All the exits were covered, he realized. His next epiphany was that his only chance of survival would be if by some miracle his 40 year-old wife could singlehandedly kill a cadre of professional killers. What an ironic end for the Butcher of Central Europe, as he was also called.
The entrance perhaps. Milo saw no reason why that, too, wouldn’t be covered but it was all he could think of. Five minutes ago, it seemed as if getting inside a building was their only hope. Now, this museum threatened to be their mausoleum.
Now completely exposed with no human cover, Milo and Irina hustled back to the main entrance and stopped short when they saw the stocky, platinum blond walk in. The noose was cinched and Dragović knew that a blood bath that favored them was the only way out. Why hadn’t he accepted that Glock that Irina had taken off the other slain bodyguard?
“Leaving so soon? You just got here!” The man at the entrance spoke in perfect Russian but with a German accent. He began walking toward them. One hand remained in a slash pocket as if keeping a rifle or shotgun tucked between his body and black leather trench coat. “I heard the museum’s collection is a bit region-specific although their collection of Russian icons is to die for.”
“Let us pass and you can live,” Irina said evenly.
The blond man stopped as if he chose to and casually scratched his ear with his free hand. To the museum-goers, it still looked and sounded as if the three were actually having a discussion about art. Dragović looked behind him and at all sides and noted that all their pursuers had stopped.
“I’ll give you one chance to take those guns out of your muff and to show me your hands.”
“Or what? You’re obviously trying to kill us.”
“Only your bodyguards. You’re coming back to Eastern Europe with us to stand trial. If you’re smart enough to cooperate.”
“Either way, it’s a death sentence.”
“Resist and it’s a certainty.”
The next thing Dragović knew, the black sable muff fell flat to the ground. Irina had pulled out both hands simultaneously and pointed the Glock and Tokarev at the stocky blond. Keeping the Russian semiauto trained in him, she quickly swiveled her head and alternately pointed the German pistol at the other goons. People began to walk away quickly, to run even more quickly and the once-serene murmuring got faster and more high-pitched.
Surely they wouldn’t kill us in front of all these witnesses! No matter who he was and no matter what he’d done, murder was still murder and they weren’t back home. There was no mob justice in peaceful, cosmopolitan Ufa. This was part of the reason Irina had spirited him back home.
Eventually, the space between the three was completely clear and the herd mentality of the witnesses quickly knew enough to get away from the other stone-faced men in black leather who weren’t running. A lone security guard was foolhardy enough to try to occupy the No Man’s Land between the three principals.
“Pahzhalustah. Put your guns down,” the middle-aged man said in a quavering voice. Dragović noted the Russian rent-a-cop wasn’t armed with anything other than handcuffs and a night stick. He was sure that that fact hadn’t been lost on the few still left at the museum.
“Mr. Security Guard, I noticed you’re married. Do you have children?” He never looked at him but past him, right into the barrel of Irina’s Tokarev.
“None of your business. What does that have to do…?”
“Do you have children, sir?” the blond asked in a sharper tone of voice.
“Two. I have two. One still at home,” the security guard said, still looking. By now he was looking very paranoid and just realizing he was in way out of his depth and was now looking for a graceful exit out of this standoff.
“Then I strongly urge you to leave or the only way your children will continue to know you is through photo albums and your wife’s tearful recollections.”
“The police should intervene…”
“We are the police,” the German said and with his free left hand he produced from his other slash pocket a badge and ID.
“Interpol,” the guard read.
“Now leave while you can. This isn’t someone trying to steal a painting.” The guard vanished as if he teleported Hopefully, Dragović thought, he’ll have the presence of mind to call the Ufa constabulary. At least with them, they’d live… until after their extradition.
“So. Now what?” the blond asked, still speaking in perfect Russian.
“You are going to get behind us and let us leave or I will kill every Goddamned one of you,” Irina said, constantly taking in all three, her severe ponytail whipping this way and that.
“I don’t recall seeing you in Sapporo. I’m more of a hockey man, myself. However, your athletic reputation precedes you. You always were a better skier than a shooter, I seem to recall reading. Your inability to consistently hit the bullseye is what cost you the gold.”
“At this range, tovarisch, I cannot and will not miss.”
“Oh, I am sure, Irina. I do not think all those years living in the presidential palace back home, in the lap of luxury, has atrophied your skills that much.”
Dragović was tired of remaining silent and letting his wife do all the talking. After all, talking was his strength, they were on his turf. He used to be a head of state and would negotiate with Brezhnev and his countless successors, for God’s sake.
“I have money, in a Swiss account. Over 200 million dollars, American. Name your price.”
“Do you honestly think it prudent to insult me with a bribe?”
“Think of the alternative,” Irina said, looking around them. “You could leave here a rich man or die here a pauper.” She pulled back the hammers of the Glock and Tokarev for emphasis. “I may or may not get every one of you but you will be the first to die.”
The German glared at her, obviously identifying the armed woman as the clearest and most present danger. He pointed a Ruger from under his trench coat. Irina fired the Tokarev and the blond staggered back and fell.
Irina haltingly took a step or two forward and she, too, fell as her husband stared at her in horrified rage. The German never got a shot off. He looked behind him. One of the other Germans, the heavily-muscled one, was still training his own Glock at his wife’s supine form. Irina was still alive but gasping for air through one good but one punctured lung. The German at the entrance was getting up, poking at a bloodless hole in his black shirt. The shot from behind spoiled Irina’s aim.
Dragović fell to his knees, sobbing. The tears were real but he had another reason for getting closer to the guns still clutched in his beloved’s hands. He curled his pasty, pudgy fingers over the Tokarev and whispered to her, “So it ends. But not like sheep…”
“…but like lions,” Irina gasped.
Dragović shot at the German again but took out the door behind him instead. Irina suddenly rolled over and evacuated the skull of her muscular attacker. The third German, a wiry brunette, riddled Irina with a series of quick bursts from his semi-auto. One round ricocheted and shattered Milo’s ankle and he went down on one knee. He unsteadily lifted the two and a half pound weapon and Hans Dietrich blew his brains out with his Ruger.
He looked dispassionately at his colleague’s semi-headless corpse in the distance then at the two bodies of what used to be the ruling couple of an obscure but oil-rich central European nation. Dietrich stepped over Milo Dragović’s body just in time to see a bolt of blood slowly strike against his scarred cheek.
“That’s for my father,” Dietrich said before spitting on both corpses.
(Nesterov Art Museum, present day)
“You have to understand, Herr Dietrich,” the head museum curator began, “we’ve never been plagued with a problem quite like this.”
The blood on the marble floor had long since been cleaned up but Dietrich nonetheless knew the curator of the Nesterov museum was standing in the precise spot where Mr. and Mrs. Dragović had died almost 18 years ago. Dietrich doubted that anyone would recognize the two “Interpol” agents who’d survived that day. His job in 1991 having been done, Dietrich and Günter left Fritz’s body behind before the Ufa police could get there.
This investigation and acquisition, if successful, would mark the first time that Dietrich had plucked from the gates of Hell a ghost that he had personally put there. If the witness sightings and surveillance videos were to be believed, then Milo and Irina Dragović had finally begun haunting the place of their untimely deaths.
Dragović had been dubbed by a less compliant western press as “the dragon of central Europe.” His casual butchery of his self-perceived political enemies also earned him the moniker “The Butcher of the Urals.”
Yet before he got in bad odor with his people and the Soviet Politburo for his excesses, he was also justly named “The Great Communicator.” Dragović’s oratorical skills were so refined and so effective his speeches were called “hypnotic” by even his most virulent detractors.
During his lifetime, it was said he could even mobilize the dead into doing his bidding. Well, Dietrich thought, let’s put that to the test and see if Dragović could live up to his own press.
It looked as if A.D.E.P.T. had the Moss kid and that he was now being protected. He had the power to unite the spirit world. So Dietrich and his employer decided they needed their own “Great Communicator.”
Milo Dragović’s onetime contemporary Ronald Reagan wasn’t the only leader called “the Great Communicator.” While Reagan swaggered through Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union was already on one knee, symbolically telling an absent Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!” his own countrymen were united through his sheer oratorical skills.
Now, 1000 miles from his native country, his breath exploding from his gaping mouth like an assembly line of ghosts, he slipped on slush as he ran for his life. His younger wife was in better shape- Back home, she jogged five kilometers daily. But she was no less scared than he; She just refused to show it.
How could they turn on him so fast?
His people, as always, were united but now against him. What initiatives and policies that had served so admirably well for 11 years were now suddenly, with the collapse of the Iron Curtain, out of vogue. Sure, prosperity could’ve been better, it always can be, but his people were still better off than they were in 1980. Who cared about 2000 political enemies getting “disappeared” or “re-educated”?
The clergy and damned human rights groups, for starters, plus the Soviet Politburo’s slow but sure withdrawal of any support. Still, how could the people turn on him so damned quickly?
On, on, his wife exhorted him and Milo Dragović’s 69 year-old body struggled to move at even his present crab-like pace. His lungs felt thick and the colder the air of Ufa grew, the more they burned. Eleven years of hiding in the presidential palace had made him as soft as a dumpling.
On, on, Irina’s shoves and tugs told him and his leaden legs somehow kept moving. They were finally exposed but they also knew they had to leave the armored BMW when their chauffer and last remaining bodyguard was killed. Neither of them knew how to drive so it was either stay in the car and wait for the sniper to find them with his armor-piercing rounds or become moving targets.
Dragović stopped and put his pudgy hands on his aching knees, his breath now ragged wheezes.
“Go. I’m… just holding you back.”
“Where you go, I go.” She kneeled down and looked into his gray eyes with her pale blue ones. Unlike Dragović, she was a pure Russian and as such was equal parts of all four elements, each one more untamed and irresistible than the last. She wasn’t a human being at the mercy of nature but a force of nature unto herself.
“Then we will both die,” he gasped. His lungs burned less with the respite even though they still felt like half-filled sandbags. “At least if we separate… you have a chance.”
“You will not talk like this,” she said. “I will not listen to you when you talk like this. If you die, we die.” For emphasis, Irina pulled from her sable coat’s right pocket a 7.62 X 25 mm Tokarev that she took off one of their dead bodyguards. 19 years ago, Irina Svetyana was a silver medal-winning biathlete for the Soviet delegation at the Sapporo Winter Olympics. Now 40, her only concession to her age was the severity in her demeanor and in her cheekbones owing to some very good plastic surgery. “Now move, my love. Move.”
He drew himself to his full height of 5 feet, 8 inches and took a couple of exploratory steps. His ample legs felt as if they were made of rubber but at least the burning in his lungs was slightly mitigated. He began trotting, his wife’s iron arm locked in his to keep him from losing his balance and footing in the snow clogged streets.
Presently, they came upon the Nesterov Art Museum on ul Gogolya west of the main street. Ufa was renowned for being a far-flung but cosmopolitan city with a strong bent for science and the humanities. The Nesterov Art Museum was known even in Moscow and Dragović’s native country as a must-see destination for any tourist in Ufa. He looked at the imperial-style eight columns and cheerful yellow paint job, the modest but still-imposing steps. Well, when in Rome…
Even as they entered the building, they donned sunglasses as they paid their admission. Still, sunglasses couldn’t hide the distinctive scar on Dragović’s right cheek, the one shaped exactly like a lightning bolt earned during his nation’s civil war in 1969.
Instinctively, Irina and Milo embedded themselves in the biggest crowds, all the while scanning their environment of anyone even remotely suspicious. But after today, with all four of their bodyguards picked off one by one and in broad daylight, their justified paranoia made weeding out the nonsuspicious much more inclusive. There’d been horrified witnesses, sure, but since Milo and Irina were obviously the real targets, the better half of human valor made for very few Good Samaritans. Which was fine by them. The last thing they needed was to be discovered and held in custody by the Ufa police. That’s how they got Nicolae Ceausescu and his own wife when they tried to flee two years ago.
Milo took a break from his paranoid search and lowered his sunglasses to admire a 15th century Russian icon. He was already ahead of the game compared with Ceausescu, Hitler and Mussolini. Ceausescu was machine gunned minutes after a two hour show trial on a military base, Hitler died in a bunker and Mussolini was also machine gunned then hung upside down like a side of beef at an abandoned gas station.
And their women also died with them, he darkly concluded.
If anyone had walked into the museum carrying a sniper rifle, the crowd could be counted on to raise a cry of alarm. So far, nothing but the usual hubbub of typical art aficionados like Dragović.
But in the end, he knew that as much as the caprices of their eagle-eyed hunter, what kept him alive was Irina. Ufa was her native city and she knew most of the streets and alleyways.
The couple let themselves be swept into a tour group. Both knew Russian fluently and they learned from snatches of conversation that they took a train from neighboring Samara to tour Ufa. Then Milo saw Irina lower her sunglasses, her right hand shifting in her matching sable muff. Following her line of vision, he saw a tall, very heavily-muscled man, possibly German, standing at an exit. His eyes radiated cruelty as he slowly began to advance on them.
Irina was about to pull out the Tokarev but Milo held her hand and shook his head. “This way,” he murmured as he pulled her away from the blonde giant.
Still believing in safety in numbers, Milo drifted with Irina to a smaller and looser knot of people until he, too, saw someone walking toward them from another exit. All the exits were covered, he realized. His next epiphany was that his only chance of survival would be if by some miracle his 40 year-old wife could singlehandedly kill a cadre of professional killers. What an ironic end for the Butcher of Central Europe, as he was also called.
The entrance perhaps. Milo saw no reason why that, too, wouldn’t be covered but it was all he could think of. Five minutes ago, it seemed as if getting inside a building was their only hope. Now, this museum threatened to be their mausoleum.
Now completely exposed with no human cover, Milo and Irina hustled back to the main entrance and stopped short when they saw the stocky, platinum blond walk in. The noose was cinched and Dragović knew that a blood bath that favored them was the only way out. Why hadn’t he accepted that Glock that Irina had taken off the other slain bodyguard?
“Leaving so soon? You just got here!” The man at the entrance spoke in perfect Russian but with a German accent. He began walking toward them. One hand remained in a slash pocket as if keeping a rifle or shotgun tucked between his body and black leather trench coat. “I heard the museum’s collection is a bit region-specific although their collection of Russian icons is to die for.”
“Let us pass and you can live,” Irina said evenly.
The blond man stopped as if he chose to and casually scratched his ear with his free hand. To the museum-goers, it still looked and sounded as if the three were actually having a discussion about art. Dragović looked behind him and at all sides and noted that all their pursuers had stopped.
“I’ll give you one chance to take those guns out of your muff and to show me your hands.”
“Or what? You’re obviously trying to kill us.”
“Only your bodyguards. You’re coming back to Eastern Europe with us to stand trial. If you’re smart enough to cooperate.”
“Either way, it’s a death sentence.”
“Resist and it’s a certainty.”
The next thing Dragović knew, the black sable muff fell flat to the ground. Irina had pulled out both hands simultaneously and pointed the Glock and Tokarev at the stocky blond. Keeping the Russian semiauto trained in him, she quickly swiveled her head and alternately pointed the German pistol at the other goons. People began to walk away quickly, to run even more quickly and the once-serene murmuring got faster and more high-pitched.
Surely they wouldn’t kill us in front of all these witnesses! No matter who he was and no matter what he’d done, murder was still murder and they weren’t back home. There was no mob justice in peaceful, cosmopolitan Ufa. This was part of the reason Irina had spirited him back home.
Eventually, the space between the three was completely clear and the herd mentality of the witnesses quickly knew enough to get away from the other stone-faced men in black leather who weren’t running. A lone security guard was foolhardy enough to try to occupy the No Man’s Land between the three principals.
“Pahzhalustah. Put your guns down,” the middle-aged man said in a quavering voice. Dragović noted the Russian rent-a-cop wasn’t armed with anything other than handcuffs and a night stick. He was sure that that fact hadn’t been lost on the few still left at the museum.
“Mr. Security Guard, I noticed you’re married. Do you have children?” He never looked at him but past him, right into the barrel of Irina’s Tokarev.
“None of your business. What does that have to do…?”
“Do you have children, sir?” the blond asked in a sharper tone of voice.
“Two. I have two. One still at home,” the security guard said, still looking. By now he was looking very paranoid and just realizing he was in way out of his depth and was now looking for a graceful exit out of this standoff.
“Then I strongly urge you to leave or the only way your children will continue to know you is through photo albums and your wife’s tearful recollections.”
“The police should intervene…”
“We are the police,” the German said and with his free left hand he produced from his other slash pocket a badge and ID.
“Interpol,” the guard read.
“Now leave while you can. This isn’t someone trying to steal a painting.” The guard vanished as if he teleported Hopefully, Dragović thought, he’ll have the presence of mind to call the Ufa constabulary. At least with them, they’d live… until after their extradition.
“So. Now what?” the blond asked, still speaking in perfect Russian.
“You are going to get behind us and let us leave or I will kill every Goddamned one of you,” Irina said, constantly taking in all three, her severe ponytail whipping this way and that.
“I don’t recall seeing you in Sapporo. I’m more of a hockey man, myself. However, your athletic reputation precedes you. You always were a better skier than a shooter, I seem to recall reading. Your inability to consistently hit the bullseye is what cost you the gold.”
“At this range, tovarisch, I cannot and will not miss.”
“Oh, I am sure, Irina. I do not think all those years living in the presidential palace back home, in the lap of luxury, has atrophied your skills that much.”
Dragović was tired of remaining silent and letting his wife do all the talking. After all, talking was his strength, they were on his turf. He used to be a head of state and would negotiate with Brezhnev and his countless successors, for God’s sake.
“I have money, in a Swiss account. Over 200 million dollars, American. Name your price.”
“Do you honestly think it prudent to insult me with a bribe?”
“Think of the alternative,” Irina said, looking around them. “You could leave here a rich man or die here a pauper.” She pulled back the hammers of the Glock and Tokarev for emphasis. “I may or may not get every one of you but you will be the first to die.”
The German glared at her, obviously identifying the armed woman as the clearest and most present danger. He pointed a Ruger from under his trench coat. Irina fired the Tokarev and the blond staggered back and fell.
Irina haltingly took a step or two forward and she, too, fell as her husband stared at her in horrified rage. The German never got a shot off. He looked behind him. One of the other Germans, the heavily-muscled one, was still training his own Glock at his wife’s supine form. Irina was still alive but gasping for air through one good but one punctured lung. The German at the entrance was getting up, poking at a bloodless hole in his black shirt. The shot from behind spoiled Irina’s aim.
Dragović fell to his knees, sobbing. The tears were real but he had another reason for getting closer to the guns still clutched in his beloved’s hands. He curled his pasty, pudgy fingers over the Tokarev and whispered to her, “So it ends. But not like sheep…”
“…but like lions,” Irina gasped.
Dragović shot at the German again but took out the door behind him instead. Irina suddenly rolled over and evacuated the skull of her muscular attacker. The third German, a wiry brunette, riddled Irina with a series of quick bursts from his semi-auto. One round ricocheted and shattered Milo’s ankle and he went down on one knee. He unsteadily lifted the two and a half pound weapon and Hans Dietrich blew his brains out with his Ruger.
He looked dispassionately at his colleague’s semi-headless corpse in the distance then at the two bodies of what used to be the ruling couple of an obscure but oil-rich central European nation. Dietrich stepped over Milo Dragović’s body just in time to see a bolt of blood slowly strike against his scarred cheek.
“That’s for my father,” Dietrich said before spitting on both corpses.
(Nesterov Art Museum, present day)
“You have to understand, Herr Dietrich,” the head museum curator began, “we’ve never been plagued with a problem quite like this.”
The blood on the marble floor had long since been cleaned up but Dietrich nonetheless knew the curator of the Nesterov museum was standing in the precise spot where Mr. and Mrs. Dragović had died almost 18 years ago. Dietrich doubted that anyone would recognize the two “Interpol” agents who’d survived that day. His job in 1991 having been done, Dietrich and Günter left Fritz’s body behind before the Ufa police could get there.
This investigation and acquisition, if successful, would mark the first time that Dietrich had plucked from the gates of Hell a ghost that he had personally put there. If the witness sightings and surveillance videos were to be believed, then Milo and Irina Dragović had finally begun haunting the place of their untimely deaths.
Dragović had been dubbed by a less compliant western press as “the dragon of central Europe.” His casual butchery of his self-perceived political enemies also earned him the moniker “The Butcher of the Urals.”
Yet before he got in bad odor with his people and the Soviet Politburo for his excesses, he was also justly named “The Great Communicator.” Dragović’s oratorical skills were so refined and so effective his speeches were called “hypnotic” by even his most virulent detractors.
During his lifetime, it was said he could even mobilize the dead into doing his bidding. Well, Dietrich thought, let’s put that to the test and see if Dragović could live up to his own press.
It looked as if A.D.E.P.T. had the Moss kid and that he was now being protected. He had the power to unite the spirit world. So Dietrich and his employer decided they needed their own “Great Communicator.”
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