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.”
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