The Bone Bridge

The Bone Bridge: Chapter 33

2010-01-03T14:49:00.000-08:00

It was the most fucked-up thing that ever happened to me, dude. I was in two places at once, like past and present. Yet I wasn’t anywhere. I could see everything that was going on in Virginia’s living room. Blood and my sister coming in from two directions, everyone yelling at eachother waving guns and asking about me and there I was, sitting on the floor yelling back, “You fucking idiots, here I am! Can’t you see or hear me?” I felt solid to myself but it was if I didn’t exist.

It was my greatest fear, being a ghost, not seen or heard, like I never existed. For years I always thought it was such an irrational reason for freaking out that I never told anyone else about it except for Clarissa and even then I waited until the night she died to tell her. Now I was realizing to my horror that maybe it wasn’t so irrational, after all.

Then almost like I had another head, this one tuned to the past, I was just getting out of Coffey’s car and Virginia ran up to another me and wrapped me up in a hug just like the day we met. Except nothing like it seemed real. Then back to the screaming, my sister putting Virginia in handcuffs, Blood doing the same thing to Coffey. Laura picked up my skateboard, took something out of one of my trucks and hugged it. Then everyone drove off and leaving the dogs alone outside. They were still whimpering and I wondered if even they could see and hear me or were scared shitless by that Nazi asshole that tried to snatch me.

I got off the floor and looked up to where he was and saw nothing but the bullet holes that Coffey put in the ceiling. Then he and Virginia were back. They were on the back deck while I or some other version of me was playing with the dogs. I walked to the back yard until I realized my feet weren’t touching the grass and that I was levitating. Being able to fly almost made up for my not being seen or heard.

I flew above my other self and tried to get my own attention. The dogs could see me or had seen me, whatever. Then Virginia was getting something, spinach maybe, out of the freezer and soon she started making the dinner I already ate while I set the table again. I didn’t know if I was hallucinating or time-traveling but I wanted to check something out. If I was just a spirit somehow and if this was where my body somehow had gone, I wondered what would happen if I tried to merge with myself. I concentrated while someone with an Australian or English accent was whispering to me, “You got the right idea, mate. No worries. Keep concentrating.”

(Sydney, Australia, May 2000)

Even after she got recruited by ADEPT shortly after killing a man, Mathilda Hogan never told them about her most potent, and dangerous, ability. In her out of body experiences, when she’d travel the world in her astral projected form, she wasn’t merely restricted to the present time frame. Somehow, she was able to channel that energy backwards so that she could go back to the past. It was almost like being a ghost and reliving a never-ending residual haunting except she’d discovered in the past year that she wasn’t confined to doing the same things infinitum ad nauseum. Then she realized as she developed this ability with manic singlemindedness that she could actually inhabit living hosts. In her astral form, she couldn’t interact with people in any way but if she took over a person’s mind and body, she was able to actually influence past events.

Like most ten year-olds who would discover this ability, she wasted her newly-found and rapidly developing powers by changing things that related solely to her. That math test she’d flunked last month was now, whether or not she earned it, an A+ when she inhabited Mrs. Macdonald’s corporeal being. Her cousin Bennie who’d once sat on her head last summer was forced to walk into a drainage ditch, spraining his arm. Thinking in such a small, solipsistic manner, she wasn’t in danger of influencing world events. No matter how much this butterfly flapped her wings, it wouldn’t result in a hurricane on the other side of the world.

Today it almost all changed and the implications scared the shit out of her.

Despite how rapidly her powers were developing, she still wasn’t close to using them maturely. What should have been a primary consideration was to her a secondary one, namely the security of her corporeal being during her OBE’s. Most ten year-olds take their safety for granted and naturally assume no one will do their bodies any harm. Yet that didn’t mean it wasn’t disturbed. While hop-scotching from one body to another in Sydney during her out of body experiences she’d never sensed anything wrong or untoward happening to her body. Mathilda’s assumption was that it had remained undisturbed, especially since she’d generally go into her trance in areas more secluded than her bedroom. Pop was gone but her Mum wouldn’t understand and would probably freak out if she walked in and found her only child in a catatonic state.

There was a favorite spot from which she loved to project, an abandoned building in the brush on the outskirts of Sydney. She wasn’t sure what it used to be but it didn’t matter. She was foolhardy and adventurous by nature and could never recall feeling fear or any real sense of trepidation that children typically fear when confronting the unknown. It was empty, it never seemed to be inhabited and that was good enough for her.

Slipping into a body was a sensuous feeling. There was never any sense of invasion, especially since her temporary possessions never seemed to result in any ill effects worse than profound confusion to her hosts. It was almost like putting on a really thick but warm coat. She could inhabit their minds and know their innermost thoughts and while she couldn’t understand some of the thoughts of the grownups in whose minds and bodies she’d inhabited these past few months, some of them did disturb her.

On this day, Mathilda had walked into this abandoned building made of cinderblocks, her rucksack of schoolbooks still on her back. She walked into her usual room, an abandoned office that had a desk and a beat-up black leather couch. She decided she’d like to see the famous opera house in Sydney that she’d seen countless times from a distance but had never actually seen up close. So Mathilda lowered her breathing, concentrated and began to lift from her body, free-floating toward the famous piece of architecture. It was weirdly beautiful, its clamshell-like structure reminding her of the shell of a Texas armadillo. Yet it was another thing entirely to be actually able to walk inside it like a normal human being. So she chose the body of a stout, middle-aged woman. As usual, her host shuddered as Mathilda began her benevolent possession and was completely unmindful of the dark man who’d just entered the cinderblock building and came upon her lifeless form.

All of Sydney had, of course, been on alert for what the press had dubbed The Bushman. He was a child predator of the worst sort in much the same manner as his American counterpart Edd Corn, the infamous child rapist-murderer who terrorized New England for years.

Unlike Corn, however, the half white/half aboriginal Bushman didn’t make any distinction between genders. Those 13 and under were fair game. And the ponytailed little girl sitting in a lotus position in his usual crime scene was the perfect age.

Oh, she was lovely and he guessed that if her eyes were open they’d be just as lovely, too, and he wondered what color they were. Amazingly, she hadn’t heard him enter the building even though the metal door creaked and his feet dryly shuffled on the sandy floor. He knelt before her, looking at her lithe, supple form, the skin on her perfect thighs a light caramel color. Her fine, glistening dark blonde hair was flawlessly pulled back in a sort of half ponytail, exposing and framing her gorgeous, oval face.

He snapped his fingers before her closed eyes and got no reaction. He had no idea why she was so insensible or what she was doing here but he wasn’t about to question the gods whether they were crazy. Instead, he’d gratefully accept this present from them and the Bushman got up and locked the door from inside.

The woman whose body she’d inhabited walked far more slowly than she would’ve liked. She wasn’t from Down Under at all but another American tourist there to see whatever few noteworthy sites Australia had to offer. She complained to her husband that her body didn’t feel right and admitted to feeling a sense of anxiety and urgency. That, of course, was Mathilda trying to get her to walk toward the famous building more quickly but it and the heat only seemed to tax the heavyset woman’s cardiovascular system. The girl shuddered with disgust as the woman began to sweat profusely. While occupying a host body, she could feel everything from the workings of the endocrine system to the cardiovascular to the neurological. She felt sexual desire for the first time while occupying adult bodies and she found she liked it if not necessarily the thoughts that came with it.

Mathilda realized she’d chosen too hastily and scouted about for a younger and more mobile body when she felt a tugging on her own. She couldn’t imagine why she was feeling that since she was not really here but back in the derelict building kilometers away. Then she had the sensation of being laid flat and pinned in place even though this host body and her astral self were perpendicular to the ground. What legs she would’ve had experienced a sense of being gently but forcibly spread. Then a sharp phantom pain between her thighs. What the bloody hell…?

She decided to abandon her sightseeing tour and abruptly left the corpulent woman’s body in favor of her own. She passed over the city of Sydney as quickly as the weird laws of paranormal physics allowed as she sped over the city, the brush, toward the building, through the building, down the hall. Mathilda saw a large man’s silhouette hunched over the couch and, beneath his naked body, her own, her flowered print dress lying in a crumpled heap on the floor next to the leather futon.

Imagine their mutual shock when Mathilda’s green/hazel eyes suddenly flew open like a doll’s and predator and prey looked at eachother.

Mathilda Hogan soon became a household name, albeit briefly, after her attacker was found dead. It was quickly established by Sydney police that her assailant and rapist was none other than The Bushman. His real name was Roland Davies and he’d been terrorizing parents across Australia for just over two years. The official body count of his exploits stood at 13 but Sydney police had every reason to fear it was actually much higher.

Of course, despite the fact that this little ten year-old girl was somehow able to do on her own what the police couldn’t, despite the relief that swept over the nation from Prime Minister Howard on down, some questions had to be answered. For starters, what was she doing in that building to begin with? She could have just said that Davies had abducted her on her way back from school but it wouldn’t have explained why she never took the bus that dropped her off a few doors from home. Mathilda wasn’t a liar by habit, anyway, and she frankly told the authorities at the hospital that she walked into the building.

It also didn’t explain how or why Davies would then suspend his rape of the girl to take out of its leather scabbard a buck knife with a blade ten inches long and two inches wide and violently jab it into his right eye or why Mathilda Hogan was also complaining of pain in her own undamaged right eye. She frankly told them how that had happened, too.

Also unexplained was why a certain Yank intelligence agency developed the liveliest interest in Mathilda. After speaking with her single mother, who was all too glad to pass off responsibility of her headstrong and adventurous daughter to people with the resources to give her structure and the education she needed, they’d secured unlimited guardianship of Mathilda. They brought her back to the States and, when she was old enough, even subsidized her pursuit of a four year degree at Georgetown University.

Mathilda always had the ability to go back to past events and she knew that she could change her personal history by simply avoiding that building or tracking down her rapist and killing him before he’d manage to lay a filthy hand on her body. But that would’ve meant never meeting Oliver Blood, ADEPT, powers developing to the point they had and never “meeting” Adam, that smoking hot, wickedly sexy boy.

If she’d changed all that, if she’d never caught the attention of Oliver Blood with her frank and open description of her psychic powers, she wouldn’t be who she was. And Mathilda Hogan liked very much who and what she was. Certainly, she would never be nearly as powerful as Adam Moss would one day be. Yet she was still perhaps the most dangerous of the adepts currently employed by the agency. However, sometimes, in her dorm room or at headquarters in unguarded moments, 19 year-old Mathilda Hogan wondered if her reluctance to go back and change history was just simply fear of seeing her dead assailant once again.

Hopefully, Adam would be braver than that since he’d absorbed her power to go back to the past and had suddenly demonstrated a latent ability of teleporting his body elsewhere.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter 32

2010-01-03T14:41:00.000-08:00

The dogs were no longer barking. It was like a mournful keening, as if someone very loved by them was suddenly taken away. They almost sounded like wolves calling out for a moon that no longer existed.

“OK, you know the drill,” Blood said to Elle, “I take the front and you take the back. We don’t know what this Coffey asshole’s state of mind will be when we go in. But we do this by the book. No matter who they got in there, we’re still professionals.”

“I gotcha,” Laura said, pulling her hair back in a hasty ponytail. She was filled with trepidation and Blood hadn’t seen that look since she was a rookie.

“Look, I know that’s your kid brother in there. That’s why I’m doubly countin’ on you staying frosty and doing the right thing, alright?”

“Don’t worry about me. Just worry about Coffey if he tries to keep me from my brother.”

“Yeah, that’s what I am worried about,” Blood said as they exited the Lincoln that was parked on the dirt road below the house.

They stiff-armed their guns pointing down then split up when Blood nodded. They tried to get backup from their agency but were told there was no one they could get in the area within the time Oliver wanted to infiltrate the house. The homing beacon had emitted a shrill, constant signal when they came upon it, meaning at least the kid’s skateboard was still on the premises. He just had to trust that Elle knew her brother as well as she claimed and that he’d never leave behind his skateboard.

Blood could hear shouting. He could hear Coffey yelling, “Where’d he go?!” and some woman yelling back “I don’t know!” He could also hear dogs, three or four maybe, barking and baying in the back yard and he hoped they were fenced in or tethered to something sturdy because they sounded fucking huge.

He kicked in the front door and trained his Browning 9 mm at Coffey who had his back to him and his own 9 mil pointed at the ceiling. A second later, Elle came in through the rear, her gun also aimed at Coffey’s head. Every room was dim and Blood instantly realized every light in the house was off, which was odd considering it was well into dusk and almost dark out.

“Drop it, Coffey! Federal agents.” Coffey released his grip on the gun and it swiveled upside down so the barrel faced the floor.

“Where’s my brother, you piece of shit?!” Elle hissed through her teeth as she took his gun, flung it across the room and pushed Coffey face-first on the couch in one smooth motion. “Answer me, Goddamn it, or so help me God…!”

“Elle, lemme handle this. You go secure the area.”

“Oh, fuck that keep-the-recruit-busy bullshit. The area is secure.”

“Moss, I said stand down.”

“Look, my brother doesn’t know where he is, either. The boy just… disappeared.”

“Bullshit, lady. People don’t just vanish into thin air. Now where did you put him, Ed? I’m not going to ask you again.”

“I told you, that prick came in, tried to snatch him, he dropped your brother after I pumped a few rounds into him and then he just… Poof.”

Elle looked up at the ceiling. Right where the top of the wall met the ceiling she could barely see in the gloom three bullet holes and she wondered why in hell Coffey would be firing 12 feet in the air if he wasn’t telling the truth.

“Who the hell are you, anyway?” Laura asked the buxom redhead.

“Virginia Hobbes. I’m the homeowner and Eddie is my brother. And he’s telling you the truth. Some flying asshole in a Nazi uniform suddenly appeared above our heads, your brother Adam was dangling five or six feet in the air then suddenly the place was full of ghosts.” Elle knowingly looked at Blood and he returned the look.

“What?” Ed asked his sister. “Full of ghosts? Right here?”

The lights suddenly came on when the solar panel batteries began expending their reserves and everyone looked up. The air vents of the centralized heating system also kicked in.

“Yes. I could only see the Nazi scumbag who tried to take Adam but I felt the presence of the others. They were protecting the boy.”

“So that’s why it was so fucking cold in here.” Coffey turned around on the sofa and sat normally. For a half minute there he was facing the back of the couch and it was obviously playing hell on his back. “Look, Laura, what we’re saying is true. That fascist fuck just popped in here, tried to snatch Adam then he just disappeared.”

“What about Jodl?” Blood asked, holstering his weapon. “Did they go at the same time or did Adam vanish first?”

“I… don’t know. I think they disappeared at the same time. I noticed Adam disappearing first because he was still on the ground. The other guy, the Nazi, was flailing around like he’d been attacked by a swarm of bees. Then I looked up and he was gone, too.”

Blood passed his large hand over his close-cropped, snow white hair and puffed out his lips in a deep sigh. He raised his eyebrows and looked at Coffey and Virginia.

“What do we do with them?” Elle asked her boss.

“They’ve seen too much. Cuff ‘em.”

“What? Bullshit, you fuckin’ dandelion.” But Elle still had her Glock 26 trained on him.

“Shut up. Adam wouldn’t be missing if it wasn’t for you, asshole.”

“Oh, you got a lotta nerve. The kid couldn’t even trust his own sister. I didn’t tell him to run off. He took off on his own.”

“And if you hadn’t been tailing us, you fucking asshole,” Elle said, taking a quick step toward him, “he wouldn’t have had anywhere to run. What the hell were you doing following my brother, let alone federal agents?”

“E-nough! Moss, chill. The. Fuck. Out. You sound like you’re arguing with your baby brother. I will handle this, capish? Now cuff the lady. I got Coffey. They’re comin’ with us.”

“With us to where?” Elle said as she broke out her set of cuffs.

“Back to headquarters.”

So I was finally getting a taste of what some of my suspects experienced when I'd put them in the back of a cruiser. It didn’t give me any more empathy over what brief misery we must’ve put them through when we racheted the cuffs too tight and shoved them in and making them tighten up some more. Those pricks I’d arrested as a patrol officer and a homicide detective deserved what they got. I didn’t.

I had a lot to think about as I spent a big part of the ride to the nearest airport in the back seat trying to reach the handcuff keys in my right front pocket. Since my wrists were cuffed behind my back, it was virtually impossible and I could only move my arms and shoulders so much to the right. So far I was barely able to get the tips of my right fingers into the opening of my side pocket.

What happened back at my sister’s place made a lot of sense and it helped answer some questions about the murder scene at the Ritz Carlton on Halloween night. The first thing that came to mind was the drop in temperature. It was colder and bitterer than my mother in law when I got plastered and threw up at our wedding reception. But after Adam fell, it was almost like a freezer and Virginia and I could see our own breath. That was pretty consistent with what I’d seen and felt in the aftermath of the Halloween massacre. I thought of the ice crystals on Mrs. Dumont’s face.

And even though I knew Adam’s dance card was for some reason filled by Beetlejuice and company, even I had a hard time believing his stories about that Nazi prick who’d offed the Christianson family until I saw him with my own eyes. The flashlight that I shined at him actually went through him even though he looked solid. But it was the look in Adam’s green eyes that terrified me. He may have been defiant up until the moment he disappeared at Virginia’s feet but the look on his face was absolutely identical to the one that Chaz had on his face just before Clossey…

In a way, I tried to empathize with Laura because if anything she was even more emotionally attached to the kid than I ever had a right to be. It wasn’t quite the same thing as what I went through but her brother disappeared under the most incredible of circumstances and she had no idea if she’d ever see him alive again. Right after she cuffed my sister and before Blood led us outside, I saw her pick up Adam’s skateboard off the living room floor. She cried and had hugged it against her chest exactly the way I did Chaz’s after he was taken from us.

I looked over at Virginia as I slowly twisted my shoulders to try to get my hands deeper into my pocket. She stiffly sat up straight, her eyes closed as if in concentration. Years of seeing Virge indulge in weirdness when we were growing up taught me to never interrupt her when she was doing that yoga shit. So I left her alone while I tried to get my handcuff keys and prayed that where ever he was, Adam was nowhere near that Nazi prick.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter 31

2010-01-03T14:32:00.000-08:00

They were known as the rarest and most powerful of all adepts. They were more powerful, in fact, than any psychic, medium, ghost or spirit. They were gatekeepers and never more than one had ever existed at a time.

Neither the living nor the dead could ever divine why or how these keepers of the gate separating their worlds were chosen. Some said personal virtue, others said pure evil and still others opined that it was a random choice that was conferred on one like a supernatural lottery. Likewise, it was never ascertained by whom this honor was conferred or whether it was the random, chaotic process of a cosmic scheme of things or intelligent design.

Every generation or two had one for at least 10,000 years. Some were virtuous, some were evil while most were neither. A few were famous and most others obscure. They were male and female, young, old and in the middle, Caucasian, black, yellow and brown. But there was no one common denominator uniting them. Adam Moss was the strangest choice in centuries, thought Jodl as he was on his way to where the boy was.

The last gateman before Adam Moss died hours before his near-fatal car accident. There was also speculation that those who had died young, suddenly or violently had committed some taboo, had violated some cosmic order and that such a transgression necessitated an abrupt adjustment.

Only two things were agreed upon by all who knew of the gatekeeper: S/he was theoretically the most powerful human in at least two dimensions and that their ability to wield that power depended upon them remaining alive. And Dietrich, Jodl had long since reasoned, was a fool for wanting this Jew boy dead even before he’d become cognizant of the full scope of his powers.

For reasons that even Dietrich didn’t realize, the Moss boy, Jew or gentile, was worth infinitely more alive than dead. Fuck Dietrich and his mysterious employer and underwriter. As Jodl hurtled toward the Moss boy’s unique and potent energy signature, he knew precisely how best to use him.

I had to admit for an older lady, Ed’s big sister was starting to grow on me and, no, it wasn’t just because of her big hooters (although that was part of it). Sometimes I thought that she was coming on to me but maybe that’s because she’s warm and sexual toward all males. Or maybe it’s because I remind her of her dead nephew.

It’s also kind of cool that Coffey and I have something in common in that we both have big sisters who sometimes tweak us and treat us like we’re still little kids.

There was one time in Vienna when Coffey saw a hornet on his sister’s window. He scoped out the place looking for something to trap it in. Finally he just put his hand over the yellowjacket. The fucking thing must’ve been stinging the shit out of him. But he kept the insect in both his hands until he could shoulder open the door and set it free.

He looked at his hands, cursed under his breath and walked into the bathroom. I asked Virge,

“Why didn’t he just swat that hornet?”

“Because he killed enough as a Green Beret, Sweetie.”

“He was a Green Beret?”

“A long time ago. He does this now, freeing the lost and trapped, saving the hopeless, giving second chances, no matter what the cost to him. He began doing this when he first went into the police academy but especially after Chaz died.”

I looked outside and remembered it was a chilly November day and that in the act of freeing and helping it, he might’ve wound up killing the damned thing.

Ghosts don’t always subscribe to stereotypes. Sometimes they don’t oblige us and take the form of entities wearing sheets and dragging chains. Ghosts can also be memories and they can dog and haunt you just like the real thing, saying “Boo!” in an infinite variety of ways.

For over 15 years, Chaz, Bea and I had populated our neighborhood, our city, with ghosts of ourselves. Supermarkets, bike trails, ball fields, skateboard parks and board shops, restaurants. We’d saturated the place with memories, memories that now take on the guise of residual hauntings.

Residual hauntings and the events therein never change, the subjects unaware of the still-living. It’s terribly, cruelly unilateral as you can’t interact with them while they affect you in ways they can’t imagine or would care to. Each memory is a ghost of Bea, Chaz and me. Without knowing it, we’d created a city of ghosts in our images. Every place my boy had been to, everywhere he walked or skated on his board is both infinitely more precious and more painful. Even here at my sister’s house, I’m surrounded by ghosts and almost all of them look like my dead boy, the only child I’m ever going to have.

So is it any wonder why my heart went out to this poor kid whose life had also been co-opted by the dead?

In a way, it was almost like her former addiction to those webcam sites where models would do live sex shows for two or three bucks a minute. Even after she’d disconnect, she’d weaken, log on again and put another $30 on her maxed-out credit card. It was worse than heroin. Then she’d find her favorite model if he was logged on, send herself to where he was whether he was in Bogota, Colombia, St. Petersburg, Russia or Manila, Philippines and have her way with whatever lucky soul she’d inspire to a monstrous orgasm and ejaculation.

Mathilda Hogan found herself addicted to Adam Moss and his sexuality, his stunning good looks and sweetness of temperament. Oliver just told her to hightail it back to ADEPT headquarters, which was where she was now, not to continue her supernatural surveillance. But she found herself in a safe room at headquarters, wet-hacking herself back into Adam’s world and immediately felt cold, which was never a good sign.

“Is it getting cold in here or is it just me?” Virginia asked Adam. She reluctantly let go of his hands and gathered her knit sweater around herself.

“You’re right,” he said, looking outside. The sun hadn’t gone behind a cloud. It was chilly outside but since none of the windows were open, there was nothing that could account for the sudden drop in temperature. In seconds, it had gotten so cold in the living room, Adam and Virginia could see their breath. Then she finally said, “Someone’s here,” as she stood up and called for her brother.

I’ve heard my sister call out my name before in all kinds of moods. She’d call to me when she was pissed off, exasperated or when she’d try to charm me into doing something that neither of us wanted to do. But I’ve never heard Virginia summon me with dread and panic and her voice was laden with both. That’s why, even though my hands were still stinging from that damned yellowjacket, I already had my gun drawn when I left the bathroom and immediately noticed that the rest of the house was like a reefer and all the lights were off.

Outside, all four of Virginia’s dogs were howling like it was the end of the world.

Because of all the times I’ve been surrounded by ghosts, I can tell you from first-hand experience, dude, that when they come calling, a good sign of their presence is when the temperature drops and batteries drain. Back when I was a kid and I was studying the paranormal, I read somewhere that when ghosts manifest, they draw energy from the air and ghost hunters with fresh batteries would have them drained in seconds just before shit happened.

Virginia didn’t have a normal electrical hookup. She’d explained to me that her home was powered with solar panels and stored in batteries somewhere. That meant that whoever had arrived at her house had a shitload of energy to suck up. And just as Coffey came rushing out of the bathroom, the lights went out and we had no illumination but whatever little we were getting from the sunset.

“Virge, where’s your flashlight?” I called into the darkness, my eyes still adjusting. The lights were on in the bathroom but by the time I burst through the door they were all off. I or anyone else who knew that Virginia had solar panels to light and warm the house would’ve assumed that we’d gotten enough sunlight to power the whole place for days.

“The kitchen drawer. Don’t get the battery-powered one. Take the silver one that cranks.”

“What the hell’s the difference?”

“There’s a big difference,” I heard. But it was Adam’s voice. Both of them knew something that I apparently didn’t. So I went rummaging through her drawer and finally found a silver thing that looked more like an electric shaver than a flashlight. I thumbed the rubber-coated on-off switch but nothing happened.

“How the hell do you turn this thing on?” I said asked as I rushed back into the living room. The crank was recessed and I had to pull it out and wind the thing up to power up the capacitor. It whined and whined like a remote control car until I could get the thing to light and when I shined it toward the couch, I wished I hadn’t. Adam was suspended about six feet in the air while Virginia was trying to pull him down by his ankles.

“Don’t just stand there, you dumb shit,” she yelled, “do something!”

Above her, above Adam was a guy in a Nazi uniform perfectly answering the kid’s description of the guy who murdered the Christiansons.

Mathilda had never seen this guy before. He was dressed in the uniform of a Nazi officer but looked almost real enough to pass for human. But this so-called human was levitating about seven or eight feet in the air and holding up Adam by his clothes while he struggled to free himself.

“Lemme go, you fuck!” the kid was saying.

Even in her astral projection, Mathilda could feel the cold and immediately sensed there wasn’t much energy in the air from which to draw, which further weakened her. At least while she was unsuccessfully guiding the kid and his handler to headquarters, she could draw energy from the cop’s constantly-charging 12 volt car battery. Traveling from place to place she could also draw from power lines and other EMF sources. But now there was virtually no electromagnetic field with which to energize herself and she immediately felt weaker. The only other alternative was to draw from the life force from the three living people in this house and after that accidental fatality in Sydney nine years ago, she vowed to never do that ever again. But what choice did she have?

Then she saw others, real spirits, flocking toward Adam, including the girl that she’d cruelly impersonated a couple of days ago. And that just further drained the EMF in the whole house.

The next thing I knew, I was hurtling back to the floor and that had something to do with that Nazi fuck named Yodel letting me go and Virginia tugging on my feet. I landed on top of her and we both wound up on the floor. I could still feel the ice cold sensation on my back from where he grabbed my clothes from behind. Coffey came running into the living room training Virginia’s little wind-up flashlight on him and fired three shots through him and into the wall where it met the ceiling. Yodel just smiled down at him as he produced some more scalpel things like the ones he used to practically decapitate the Christiansons.

The piece of shit stopped smiling when he found himself surrounded by the Christianson twins, Clarissa and a shitload of other ghosts that I never saw before, including some really hot chick with an Emo hairdo that looked at me with the same “I wanna fuck you” way “Clarissa” did on the road.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter 30

2009-11-24T09:34:00.000-08:00

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.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter 29

2009-11-24T09:30:00.000-08:00

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.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter 28

2009-11-24T09:24:00.000-08:00

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?”

The Bone Bridge, Chapter 27

2009-11-17T12:04:00.000-08:00

“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)

The Bone Bridge- Chapter 26

2009-11-17T12:01:00.000-08:00

(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.

The Bone Bridge- Chapter 25

2009-11-04T12:45:00.000-08:00

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.”

The Bone Bridge- Chapter 24

2009-11-04T12:38:00.000-08:00

“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.

The Bone Bridge- Chapter 23

2009-11-04T12:30:00.000-08:00

(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.”

The Bone Bridge: Chapter 22

2009-10-19T13:13:00.000-07:00

Chapter 22

I wasn’t sure if what I was doing qualified as a working vacation. But my chief wasn’t too pleased about me putting in for one just when the task force was getting into full swing, if you can call a bunch of guys following one dead lead after another and literally chasing ghosts “full swing.” Luckily, he knew about the hard time Beatrice and I had had after Chaz’s death and everyone in the department knew that she often suffered from depression for which no pharmaceutical company had developed a pill. So he had no choice but to accept my half-true excuse that I was taking vacation for personal reasons.

Strictly speaking, I was telling the truth in a warped sort of way. For some reason, and maybe Chaz has something to do with this, the Moss kid just had a way of getting under my skin and if anything had happened to him after everything that had already happened to him, I would take it very personally, indeed. I didn’t feel the need to justify that. All the same, I hated myself a little for using Chaz or at least leading my coworkers and superiors into believing that his abrupt death and its belated effect on my wife and me was the reason I had to take a week off.

I knew exactly where to find the kid after they took off with him in Quincy. On Halloween night I bribed a bellhop to call me if he saw anyone suspicious enter the hotel or the penthouse and I went back to my office to find a message from him waiting for me. When I called him on his cell, the bellhop said he saw a tall black guy, “a smoking hot blonde with a nice rack” and some Emo kid. I’m glad he called me but on reflection I’m wondering which one he considered suspicious in a five star hotel: The kid with the Emo hairdo, the hot blonde with the big tits or the black guy.

Whatever his reason for calling me, I couldn’t believe my good luck. When I told the tall kid in the organ grinder getup to tip me off to anyone suspicious (he held out his hand, apparently not happy that I crossed his palm with just my calling card), I wasn’t thinking of anyone from the government. Hell, back on Halloween, I didn’t know any of the three existed. But when you’re stymied with a case that doesn’t want to be solved, sometimes it’s best to go back to basics, like the elementary rule of criminology of the criminal always returning to the scene of the crime (which isn’t even remotely true, by the way, even if you take into consideration all the home games played by the Red Sox since the ’86 World Series or the trips Bush made to Iraq).

So far I was one for one and that alone emboldened me to push my luck and to keep following the kid. I knew they were planning on taking him to the mother ship and I was bound and determined to hitchhike on the tractor beam. The only problem was getting into their headquarters without being seen or recognized, especially since both Laura and Blood had already met me.

Then I realized that may be immaterial as I saw the three of them walk out of the front door of the Ritz Carlton.

I looked at Laura as we came down the elevator. Oliver Blood was standing to my right and I glanced at his fuzzy reflection of the shiny gold doors. I wanted to talk to my sister in private ‘cuz I was still way short of trusting this Blood dude enough so that I could comfortably rap with Laura in the open. Besides, a ghost at that café told me I couldn’t trust him. I never saw that ghost before or since but they generally don’t lie like we living folks do.

The double doors parted and we took a few steps before I deliberately stepped on one of my shoelaces and undid the knot. I bent down knowing that Laura would stop. Blood took a couple of more steps before he realized we weren’t with him and he stopped and turned around.

“Go on ahead. I have to retie my shoe.” He looked at Laura and slowly walked down the lobby but stayed clear of the revolving door. I looked up at Laura as I fooled around with my laces. “Mom and Dad aren’t coming, are they?”

Laura sighed and looked at Blood, who sat down while keeping an eye on us. She partly turned her back to him so he couldn’t read her lips. “No, Adam, they’re not.”

“So when am I gonna see them again?”

“I don’t know.” Looking at Blood again. “Look, Bro, Oliver didn’t want me to tell you this so soon but we had to take Mom and Dad into protective custody.”

“What?!” I had to remind myself to continue fiddle-fucking with my shoelaces. “Waddya mean, ‘protective custody’? Protect them from what?”

“We had to take them to a safe house. Just as a precaution.”

“Why? Where are they?”

“Just as a precaution, Honey. No one’s threatened them. But after what happened to the Christiansons, we can’t take chances.”

“So where the fuck are they?” I looked up at that Blood dude and, yep, he was still staring at us like we were a hooker and a john and he was the hotel dick. I switched to the other shoe to buy us some more time.

“I… I’m sorry, Hun, I can’t tell you that.”

“You’re not…?” I lowered my voice, kept my head down and hoped my long bangs hid the anger on my face. “You won’t tell me where you stashed our own mother and father?”

“Adam, it’s for your and their own good. It’s best you don’t know. That way they can’t get their location from you.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Whoever.” Now I know why it drives my Mom crazy every time I saw “Whatever” to her. Somehow, I knew my sister was talking about that Dietrich asshole who obviously sent Field Marshall Yodel to off the Christiansons just to make a point to me. “Look, if it makes you feel any better, I don’t know, either. That way, nobody can use me to get to them, either.”

“’Cuz they’re my Achilles heel, right?”

“Exactly. And your reaction to this is the reason Oliver didn’t want you to know about this so soon. But Mom and Dad are just fine. We have them in one of the safest, most secluded safe houses in the country.”

Blood got up from the chair and began walking toward us again. I tied my right sneaker with the blood stain on the instep and got up. I tossed my bangs out of my eyes and gave her a blank stare that only she could decipher. It’s the kind of sociopathic look that I give someone just before I fuck ‘em good. I gave Oliver the same look as I passed him.

I was parked in my Crown Vic on the other side of the toney Mass Ave and 45 minutes into playing a game called, “Who’s Got an Older Shitbox Than Me?” The count was somewhere at zero when I saw the Moss kids and Oliver Blood materialize from the revolving door. On account of those ridiculous bangs and the traffic that intermittently obscured my view, I couldn’t make out Adam’s face that well. But his body language and the way he set his mouth all but convinced me that he wasn’t too thrilled about something.

I began to wonder where their parents were and if that had anything to do with how grim he looked. After all, the kid was at first the prime suspect then a material witness in a double homicide that practically called for two body bags and two bowling bags. Even though the kid was now 18, he was still living at home and you’d think his folks, after hearing about it, would want to have a word or two with the pertinent police authorities. Unless Elle Moss and her creepy boss whisked them somewhere else, which would make the Moss kid’s involvement a little more interesting.

Then Adam tossed his bangs out of his face, immediately locked eyes with me even across four lanes of busy traffic and completely freaked out.

I knew that Laura and her boss both met Coffey but as far as I knew, neither of them had any clue what car he drove. But when I threw my hair out of my eyes I just happened to see him across Mass Ave in his shitbox. Blood and Laura were in front of me and I just somehow knew it wouldn’t be cool if they saw him, too. So, good idea or bad, I did the only thing I could think of on the spot- I spazzed out in front of about a hundred strangers, my sister and her boss.

“Leave me the fuck alone!” I screamed. It’s kinda fucked up but Laura and Blood were almost the only two people who bothered to pay any serious attention to me.

“Adam, what’s going on?” my sister asked while looking around. Not that she would’ve seen anything even if I was seeing ghosts. The truth is, I hadn’t seen one since Commandant Yodel flew through the Christianson’s ceiling after offing the whole fucking family. I don’t know what creeped me out more- When my personal space became Ghost Central or when they avoid me.

“It’s… it’s them!” I yelled, pointing every which way but where Coffey was parked. I was hoping my act wouldn’t make him sit there and gawk at me but make him move so that Laura and Blood wouldn’t see him. “Get away from me!” Oliver suddenly appeared and grabbed my arm like a vise.

“We’ve got to get him out of here. He’s exposed.”

“Adam, Honey, who is it? What do you see?”

“I… I dunno. I never saw them before.”

“We can ask him later, Moss. Let’s move.” He pushed me toward some shiny black SUV near the hotel entrance and shoved me in the back seat. Laura then slid next ti me. As Blood got behind the wheel and turned the key, I looked across the street. Coffey was gone.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter 21

2009-10-16T11:53:00.000-07:00

Chapter 21
(The Boston Ritz Carlton)

It kinda creeped me out that Oliver Blood would rent a room in the same hotel where 53 people croaked just last month. I told myself not to look at the pavement as we walked toward the front entrance but I did, anyway. Lucky for me they managed to hose all the blood off the sidewalk. Otherwise I would’ve ralphed all over Greater Boston.

This is where Blood was staying during his time in Massachusetts and, in a way, it made perfect sense. I was sorry that Coffey wasn’t able to go along. For some reason, I feel better when he’s near me. He gives me a sense of security that I just don’t get with my folks or even Laura, now that I know what kinda shit she does for a living.

“Why wouldja wanna stay here, dude?” I asked him as we waited for the elevator to take us to the 10th floor.

“It makes perfect sense,” he said and my sister nodded when I looked at her. But I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. If what Laura was hinting was true about ghosts being responsible for the mass suicide, then what chance would Blood have of collecting evidence that the cops wouldn’t already get? I mean, it’s not like ghosts leave fingerprints, foot prints or DNA at crime scenes.

We stepped into the elevator and listened to some schmaltzy song and Blood was humming, “…and when she passes, each one she passes goes… da dee dum… I never could memorize all the lyrics to that song. You guys know how the rest of it goes?” Laura and I both silently gawked at him.

Ding!

We walked to room 1012 and he stopped to fish out his passkey. He swiped the card and the door clicked and opened. It was pretty ritzy (hence the name of the hotel, I guess) and was way better than any of the rooms my folks got when we used to drive down to Miami almost every winter to see our mom’s folks while Laura and I were growing up.

“Make yourself at home, Adam. Can I get you something?” He pointed to a mini fridge in the room.

“Sure. Do you have iced coffee in there?”

“Well, lemma check,” and he rummaged around for a minute and pulled out a small bottle of Starbucks iced coffee “Well, waddya know?” He walked across the big room and handed it to me.

“Thanks. How much is this room settin’ you back?” I asked as I popped the cap off.

“Not a cent. Uncle Sam pays for it all.”

“In other words, we, the taxpayers,” Laura reminded us as she walked past me to put her jacket on the bed. “Nothing’s free, guys.”

“Alright, I stand corrected,” Oliver said with a fake bow. He popped open a diet Coke, although I don’t know why he’d need it. The dude’s about as skinny as me. “Please, have a seat.”

Laura pulled up a couple of chairs for us to sit on. “Alright, I know it’s not gonna be easy for you, kid, but you need to tell us what happened in that house. Don’t forget any details. There’s no such thing as a small or trivial detail. But before you start…”

He pulled some big-ass pen out of his jacket pocket, pressed a tiny button on it and these thin red lasers flared out from the tip almost like an umbrella that extended from one side of the room to the other. All these little red dots slithered up and down all four walls. Blood held it high and passed it low while looking at a little green light on the shaft, especially when he got near the phones, ventilation grills, lamps, basically anywhere you could stick a bug. Laura watched him closely like she’d seen him do this shit before. I’ve never seen anything like that before and didn’t know you could use lasers like that. I thought they were just made for Pink Floyd light shows.

“OK, we’re all set,” he said as the light on his pen went out and he clicked the end with his thumb and the fucking thing actually was a pen. He pulled a small notebook out of his blazer and began writing something. “Now, tell me exactly what happened.”

I looked down at my sneakers and stared at the Christiansons’ blood, almost wishing the cops hadn’t given me my shoe back.

(Four hours ago)

“There’s no sense in trying to warn them about me. They cannot see or hear me,” the Nazi said.

“Who are you?”

“Henry Christianson.”

This Nazi dude would’ve set my teeth on edge even if I wasn’t Jewish. But I am and of course I’d heard all the stories of what the Nazis did to our people during World War II. I guess it’s the kinda reaction an African American person has when they see someone wearing Klan robes. Just seeing that uniform, hearing that accent almost, I dunno, put in my head memories of a Holocaust that even my parents were too young to live through. Details came and went, almost like he was some old black and white TV image that wasn’t ever quite right. But I could make out every detail on his uniform including his medals, ribbons and an Iron Cross.

“I am Doctor Heinrich Jodl. And you must be… Adam Moss.”

“How do you know my name, dude?”

“You told us your name, son.”

OK, this was seriously weirding me out. Hardly any ghosts had ever mentioned me by name. None of them had ever known or called me by my full name. The twins had risen from the love seat like they knew before me what was going to happen and maybe they did. Because the next thing I knew, they both began screaming and shot toward the Nazi with impossible speed. As fast as they were, though, this Yodel asshole was even faster.

“Son, are you alright?”

He sliced through the air with that scalpel and caught one of the twins across her stomach. I never knew that ghosts could feel pain and she was definitely in pain. She grabbed her gut, spazzed out in midair then disappeared, leaving the twin with the ponytail alone with this fucking psycho. If what my sister said about this dick was right, then he’s been dead for about 65 years and is probably better at fighting and shit than these girls who’ve only been dead since last year. I was hoping that defending their parents would give them the edge.

“Adam? Who are you talking to? And what are you looking at?” I forgot all about the Christiansons as this silent war was going on behind them. “Son, are you alright?” The father looked at his wife like he was about to ask her to call the guys with the butterfly nets.

“We have to get out of here. Now.” I shot up from the chair across from them.

“Adam, what is going on with you?” They both looked behind them to what I was seeing.

“Dude, if I were you, I’d get outta here, now.” Jodl, too, had turned invisible but I felt a cold hand on my right shoulder shove me down into the chair. I honestly couldn’t get back up. Then the other twin appeared, still clutching her stomach and the other one got behind the Nazi and they both flew circles around him. This Yodel creep now had a scalpel in each hand and he began spinning right behind the couch like one of those fucking things you see in blenders. The twins screamed in agony and they disappeared in pieces. The motherfucker shredded them. I never knew you could do that to ghosts. And I guess no one had ever thought that bad ghosts could injure and even kill the good ones.

“There, that’s better.” By now he’d stopped and repositioned himself behind the Christiansons who, for some fucked up reason, didn’t seem any more capable of getting up from their sofa as I was from their chair. But them not getting up looked voluntary, which just drove me crazier.

“Please, get up. He’s gonna kill you!”

“What? Who’s going to kill us?”

“Young man, I think it’s time you left,” Mr. Christianson said as he finally began getting up from the sofa. But like I would tell Coffey later, Yodel was faster. A lot faster. The scalpel slit his throat and blood sprayed out on my right sneaker before his wife even knew what was going on. In fact, I screamed before she did.

“Come on, stop it! Why’re you doing this?”

“To send a message,” the bastard said before he nearly decapitated Mrs. Christianson. Her scream turned into a gurgle then a death rattle.

“He killed the twins?” Blood looked at me like I was a ghost and I hate it when people look at me like that. That’s why I try not to tell too many people about my glimpses. He looked past my shoulder at my sister. “Even I never knew they could do that.”

“Look, I dunno if he actually killed them, alright? But I can tell you that he fucked them up both pretty good. They were screaming in pain.” I shook my head and looked at my bloody sneaker again. “And, trust me, dude, you don’t ever wanna hear a ghost scream for any reason, especially out of pain.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Blood said.

“I wonder why Jodl left you alive…” Laura said behind me. I turned to her.

“Because he wanted me to tell somebody. Maybe you guys.”

“Or maybe because he was told to keep you alive,” Blood said, flipping his notebook closed.

“Told by who?”

“Hans Dietrich,” Laura said. I looked at Blood and he was looking at his leather loafers like he was trying to avoid my eyes. “Honey, I’m afraid we’ll have to take you into protective custody.”

“What? Hey, look, I didn’t sign up for this, guys. If he wanted me dead, he would’ve killed me.”

“He kept you alive for a reason, Adam. Or maybe killing the Christiansons was a warning of some sort.”

“Warning me not to do what?”

“What you’re already doing,” Laura said.

“What am I doing?” I asked her but Blood beat her to the answer.

“Developing,” he said.

The Bone Bridge- Chapter 20

2009-10-07T08:11:00.000-07:00

(The Christianson Home, Quincy, MA)

By the time I got to the Christianson home, Adam was a sight to behold. He was hunched over in a chair wearing just one sneaker because the other had been impounded as evidence. Ordinarily, I would’ve been a fish out of water because Quincy was way out of my jurisdiction. To the Quincy PD, I was no better than a civilian but the fact that Adam had called me from a house phone to tell me what had happened put me squarely in the middle of this. When the poor kid called me at my office in Boston and gave me his hysterical statement over the phone, I immediately called the Quincy PD and let them take over while I hightailed it north.

It couldn’t have looked any worse for the poor kid and while I didn’t know whether to believe him, all I knew for sure was that he didn’t do it. Adam sat on the couch opposite the bodies, which had been covered up but not moved. With his one shoeless foot, he looked tinier and more fragile than when he woke up from that coma.

“Adam, what happened?” He just told me what happened and sort of how it happened but he was crying and screaming over the phone and I couldn’t make out half what he was saying.

“He was so fast, Detective Coffey. He was so Goddamned fast.” He never looked up at me but just kept rocking back and forth.

“Who was? Who did this?”

“Hey!” I heard from across the living room. “Who the fuck are you? Who the fuck is this? Hey, put down the fuckin’ donuts and someone tell me who the hell this guy is?” I took it to be the lead detective on the case, some tall, slightly overweight guy with too much gel in his hair. His face was almost as red as the shag carpet under us.

I guess I committed a breach of protocol and didn’t give the lead dick the courtesy of a heads up before approaching the kid. In his mind, he’d be the lead suspect, at least a material witness, and he didn’t appreciate some bozo coming out of left field and interrogating his collar, even though I was the bozo who phoned it in to them. As I did when I got to the front door, I pulled my badge and showed it to him.

“Boston PD? A little outta your jurisdiction, ain’tcha, Coffey?”

“Don’t forget, I’m the one who called in this 187. The kid called me.”

“You know him?”

“Yeah. He’s helping me with another case.”

“Another case? Did he wax another family in your back yard?” Adam looked like he was ready to burst into tears and anger began rising up inside me like a wellspring.

“Whatever happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’? Does this kid look like a killer to you?”

“I don’t know, hot shot. Why don’t you tell me what a killer’s supposed to look like? It would make our jobs a fuck of a lot easier.”

“From where I’m standing, Detective Sassoon,” I said, looking at his overly gelled hair, “you couldn’t make your job easier if the killers made appointments and sold ring side seats.”

“Alright, get the fuck…”

“Did you bother looking at the preliminary evidence?”

“We have our CSI guys looking it over right now, hot shot.”

“Can I see the kid’s sneaker?”

“Fuck you. You don’t even belong here. Do I have to have my chief call your chief to get you out of here?”

In other words, my Dad can beat up your Dad.

“Just show me the sneaker and I’ll show you what I’m talking about.” The lead detective looked at me sardonically then held out his hand behind him.

“Marv, show me that shoe.” Adam’s sneaker, in a plastic evidence bag, was put into his waiting hand and he passed it to me. “I’m just doing this to humor you and get you the fuck outta here. Don’t take it out.” Then he added condescendingly, “That’s what we call… ‘evidence’.”

I gave him a shitty look and turned the sneaker this way and that and my suspicions were confirmed. “Look at this bloodstain on the carpet,” I said as I squatted down on my haunches and pointed to a peninsular-shaped, still-wet blood stain right in front of Adam’s stocking foot. “Did you measure it? It looks like it’s about half, maybe three quarters of an inch wide.”

“Yeah, so?”

“OK, look at his sneaker. There’s a bloodstain on the toe consistent with the same type of blood, I’m guessing arterial considering how bright it is, and the same width as that arterial spray.”

“So what?”

“That means the kid would’ve had to have been sitting right where he is when the murders took place, not behind the victims or right in front of them as he would have to be but at least four and a half feet away from the victims. Do you see any blood on his hands, on his clothes?”

“That doesn’t prove nothin’! He could’ve had an accomplice. He could’ve washed and changed clothes. He coulda done any number of things.”

“If he changed his clothes, where are the bloody ones? If he had an accomplice, then why did he stay behind and call me from the family’s house phone? Come on, even a neanderthal like you can’t believe that.”

“Alright, that’s it. Get out of here, you fat fuck, before I have you arrested for disturbing a crime scene and tampering with a material witness.” I spread my feet and was about to slug this prick into the next dimension when I heard a female’s voice.

“You won’t do any such thing, Detective O’Brien.” Laura Moss walked into the place as if she’d just passed papers with the Christiansons and flashed her creds. I took note that she got a somewhat wider berth than I had with my shitty Boston PD ID. I never thought I’d be so glad to see her and especially Oliver Blood, who followed Adam’s sister. Blood never even had to reach for his own creds. I assumed the kid called his sister at around the same time he called me and she brought Blood with her before he hopped back on a jet to DC. Considering that he’d had his little coffee klatch with Adam over two days ago, I was surprised that he was still in Massachusetts and not back in our nation’s capitol running his agency. In fact, I was tempted to ask him why he was still hanging around until I reminded myself of two things. One, I wasn’t supposed to know who he was and Two, he and Laura were still mine and Adam’s two best and only bets out of this mess.

Laura went directly to her brother and O’Brien was about to get between them when Laura showed him her ID again and said in a low voice, “This is my kid brother. Back off.” She had her back turned to me but I could imagine the pure venom that must’ve been quivering behind her corneas because when he saw her straining at the leash with the weak link O’Brien backed off and pulled the uniforms away from the immediate area.

“Honey, are you alright? Adam, look at me.”

Adam’s eyes finally locked with his sister’s as if just becoming aware that she was in the house.

“Sweetie, tell me what happened.”

“Where’s Mom and Dad?”

“I called them. They’ll meet up with us later. You’re coming with Oliver and me.”

“Who are you?” Oliver Blood was looking right at me, squinting his large hazel eyes at me in curiosity.

“Detective Ed Coffey, meet my boss Oliver Blood. Oliver, Ed.” She went back to her brother without offering any other explanation as to why we were associated.

“Oh, you’re the Boston city detective on the Ritz task force.” He acted as if he knew about me, which made sense. I’m sure that Laura had reported back everything she’d learned from our skull session.

“Well, I’m just one of several.” Neither one of us offered our hand. We were taking each other’s measure just as he and Adam did a couple of days ago. “May I ask what’s your interest in the Ritz Carlton case?”

“Sure.”

We both let that four letter answer hang between us. The inference was clear: “Sure, you can ask, but will I actually tell you? Ha ha ha.”

It would’ve been easy for me to dismiss Blood as a typical federal prick who looks down on us local yokels as charmingly provincial at best, the kind of prick that wouldn’t think twice about peeing in everyone’s back yard just to mark their territory. But there was something more to this guy than just that. Plus I was thinking of that voice that I’d heard yesterday on Adam’s mp3 file, the disembodied one that said, “Don’t trust him.”

I almost shook my head. I can use my own judgment in human nature without having to be informed by ghost whispers. Still, I couldn’t account for the identity of the person who said it but I got the unshakable sense that whoever it was was talking about Blood. I never had the chance to ask the kid if he got a glimpse of who’d said it.

“Adam, sweetheart, look at me. Who did this?”

“Yodel.”

“Yoda?” O’Brien said as he shambled into the living room? “Who the fuck’s this Yoda guy?”

“Jodl,” Elle corrected him with barely-concealed impatience. “J-O-D-L. How do you know it was Jodl?”

“He was wearin’ a Nazi uniform and he used a scalpel. I could see every detail, even the Iron Cross on his chest.” He looked into his sister’s eyes again. “And he told me who he was. Like he wanted someone to know. Just before he…”

“A Nazi did this? Are you shitting me?”

“Detective, please! If my brother said he saw a man in a Nazi uniform and that he killed these people, then he did.”

“Oh, well, since he’s your kid brother and all, what the fuck. Let’s all just call it a day and go home!”

“Detective, you’re acting very unprofessionally,” Elle said standing up.

“I am? Alright, listen up, Agent Moss: We did some checking up on your brother’s background. Seems he’s already spent time in the Laughing Academy a few years back for, guess what? Cutting himself with a razor. Then he wound up back there again just this past month. I know doin’ background checks on capital crimes suspects looks a little unprofessional on the surface, but…”

“Alright, Detective O’Brien, you made your point. But my brother’s medical history has no bearing on this case.”

“Really, now? Let’s see,” said O’Brien as he warmed up, counting off on his fingers. “He’s the only witness to a double homicide, he’s the only other person in the house and he’s got the victims’ blood all over his shoes. He’s already shown a fondness for sharp-edged weapons and now he’s blaming it on Nazis. And he just got out of a loonie bin. Did I forget anything?’

“Yeah,” said Blood. “The part where we take custody of him, asshole, while you stand there with your greasy thumb stuck up your ass.”

Which is exactly how it worked out after some interdepartmental cockwanding, calls to the mayor of Quincy and more to both state and federal attorneys. Whoever Blood and Adam’s sister were, they had more juice than Ocean Spray and Jamba combined to get Adam sprung from police custody considering how guilty he looked. It wasn’t really a matter that the federal government was taking into protective custody someone about to be charged with a capital crime in a municipal jurisdiction. What it all came out to was whose badge was shiner than whose and mine and O’Brien’s were made out of pewter as far as Moss and Blood were concerned.

The Bone Bridge- Chapter 19

2009-10-01T07:09:00.000-07:00

Chapter 19

Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to come home and find two chicks sitting on your bed and your parents out of the house. But it can be a real downer if they’re both dead. The ghost twins from earlier that day were back and looking at me with pleading eyes. “Tell Mom and Dad we’re sorry,” they kept saying and I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Why don’t you tell them yourselves?!” I yelled at them. I forgot that I’m some magical tuning fork because of an accident of fate, someone who can not only see ghosts but someone to whom they’re attracted. I still don’t understand why some people can see ghosts and why others can’t. I just wished that more of us could and take the pressure off me. It was like I’d put up a gigantic sign at the Pearly Gates that said, “Adam Moss: Paranormal Private Detective, Reasonable Rates.”

I felt crappy for yelling at them and sighed as they kept looking up at me with those four big eyes. “Alright, where did you live?” They flew up from the bed and through the closed window. I went to it and saw them flying around outside looking up at me. Obviously, they wanted me to follow them. They kind of reminded me of dogs.

As it turned out, they lived in Quincy, the next town north of us. From where I live in Braintree, that’s no more than a 20 minute ride on my skateboard. So I got my board and ran back out with it. It still beat sitting in my room waiting for the next rush of dead strangers to ask me for the same things. If I was able to track down their folks, at least I’d get to talk to some living people for a change who didn’t carry guns or see dead people like me.

I live in north Braintree so it was wicked easy getting to south Quincy on my board. The girls flew beside me on both sides and we actually had some fun. They each took a hand and pulled me along route 37. The motorists were probably wondering how a kid on a skateboard could keep up with them when they were doing 30 or 40 miles per hour and uphill, at that. A few of them looked weirded out when they saw me whizzing by them with my arms out. Obviously, they couldn’t see the two ghost chicks that were pulling me along. All I had to do was keep my balance.

I still don’t know if they were doing it out of any sense of fun or if they were just trying to get me to their folks’ house that much faster. I couldn’t always see their faces but neither of them were smiling. All I knew was I was having a fuckin’ awesome time blasting past cars on my skateboard. My hands were so cold they were beyond numb but I didn’t care. It was the first time I ever had fun with anyone who was dead and definitely the only fun I’d had since Halloween night.

We were already in Quincy when they let go of my hands and I coasted to a stop in front of a Victorian house. They floated to the front yard and were silently hovering just above the grass. I asked them “Is this it?” and one of them turned to me and nodded then moved her finger like she was inviting me in. I kicked the front of my board into my hand and slowly made my way up the walkway. I didn’t even know their names, first or last. Luckily the front of the house had the family name on a cursive wooden nameplate mounted to the right of the door. Their name was Christianson. Maybe they were getting a sense of my shyness so the girls gently nudged me to the door and I rang the bell. I was having so much fun boarding into Quincy on ghost power that I never thought about what I’d say or how I’d introduce myself when they finally opened the door. And with these ghost chicks poking me in the back, I wasn’t exactly getting inspired.

I heard someone walking from the other side and a middle-aged woman answered the door. We looked eachother up and a down for a few seconds as she took in my Emo boy ‘do that was growing out (I guess it was a good thing I decided to let the purple fade). If I was into older ladies, I’d say she was a MILF. She had shoulder-length blonde hair that she parted on one side and wore down. She also didn’t have a bad bod.

“Yes?”

“Uh, Mrs. Christianson?”

“Yes? Can I help you?”

Shit. I never knew their daughters’ names. What was I gonna say?

“I know your daughters. Or, knew them. I dunno.”

“Did you go to school with Marlene and Darlene?”

“Uh, not exactly. I live in Braintree.”

I looked back to where I came from and the girls were now hovering just above the front porch, looking at their mother. It was as if they couldn’t see them until I brought them over, although I couldn’t see how anyone or anything could’ve stopped them.

“Excuse me a minute. Henry? Could you come here?”

The lady was tall and I think on a good day she might have been able to take me in a fair fight but she called her husband. Oh, shit, suppose he was one of those psychos who goes all apeshit when salesmen and Jehovah’s Witnesses come to the door? Plus, as the girls told me, they just lost their daughters a year ago. They were probably still grieving.

But her husband looked pleasant enough. He was a couple of inches taller than his wife which means I only came up just above his shoulder. I may have just turned 18 the day before but I always looked younger than my age, probably because of my big eyes, slender build and almost total lack of facial hair. It would take a real grade A psycho to view me as any kind of a threat.

“What’s the matter, Hun? Can I help you, son?”

“This young man says he knew Marlene and Darlene.”

“Oh. Well, what’s your name, young man?”

Hell, I never even introduced myself. Your manners kinda tend to atrophy when you spend almost half your life with other kids at a skateboard park or online typing with one hand (Yeah, I’m still kidding about that.).

“Uh sorry. My name’s Adam. Adam Moss.”

“And did you go to school with our daughters?”

“He said no. He comes from Braintree.”

“Hun, let him speak for himself. So, how did you know our daughters?”

“They’re… Look, you’re gonna think I’m crazy and I couldn’t blame you but they’re here with me right now.”

They just stared at me in a way that made me glad they didn’t know about my “history.”

“Is this supposed to be funny?” He moved the door like he was about the close it then one of the girls whispered in my left ear.

“One of them says, ‘Tell him I broke Mom’s crystal vase and buried the pieces in the back yard.’”

Mr. Christianson opened his eyes then the door a little more.

The three of us sat in the living room looking at each other uncomfortably like someone ripped a massive fart and no one would own up to it.

“So, why should we believe you just because you say our daughters’ ghosts are with you?” the father finally said.

“Look, you know I’ve never been here before, right? I can tell you the floor plan of your whole house. The girls can tell me everything about it and I can tell you. Past that doorway is the kitchen and you have a pantry with a loose shelf because the nail fell out years ago and you never got around to fixing it. The half bath next to it, the toilet handle has to be jiggled if you want the tank to stop filling. Do you want me to go on?”

They both looked at me again and the mother got up. “I have to go in the kitchen. Do you want anything, Adam?”

“No thanks, ma’m, I’m all set.”

“So what else do our daughters tell you?”

“First off, they don’t know they’re dead. They’re still afraid you’re going to ground them because they slipped out of the house. You grounded both of them until you found out who broke your wife’s crystal vase that you bought in England 11 years ago. It was missing and you found a sliver of glass on the floor and that’s how you knew it was broken. Look, I didn’t ask to come here. But they won’t leave me alone.”

“So, if our daughters came back from the dead, why would they seek you out considering they never knew you?”

“I dunno, Mr. Christianson but it’s not like they’re the only ones.” He looked at me again. “It happens to me a lot. Your daughters aren’t the only ones asking for my help.”

I could hear Mrs. Christianson puttering around in the kitchen then I heard the sound of a board being moved. The one in their pantry. Then I heard crying.

“They just want you to go easy on them. They’re afraid you’ll ground them all over again for sneaking out.”

The mother came out clutching a tissue.

“Can you see them?”

I looked to my left. “Oh yeah.” They were huddled up on a love seat looking and listening.

“Can you see what they’re wearing?” she asked.

I looked at them again. “Yeah. They’re both wearing what looks like miniskirts with light blouses or shirts. One has her hair up in a tight ponytail, the other’s wearing her hair down.” The mother started bawling like a baby and I felt like shit. I guess that’s exactly how…

“…that’s exactly how they looked when they got into that car accident,” the father said. He looked very defeated all of a sudden and all I wanted to do was to get the fuck out of there. This is what those military guys have to go through when they go all over the country telling moms and dads that their sons and daughters got killed in some damned war or another. Their whole lives are spent giving nothing but bad news that devastates families. I mean, who the fuck would wanna do that shit for a living? But then, it occurred to me that they were just following orders and maybe they had no choice. After all, someone’s gotta give the bad news in person, right?

Then someone else walked into the house, someone who was wearing a uniform. That was really fucked up for three reasons. One, because I was just thinking about guys in uniform, Two because I didn’t hear anyone open and close the door. And Three? This guy was wearing a Nazi uniform and holding what looked like a scalpel.

“Entschuldigen Sie mich,” he said as he walked behind the couch where the Christiansons were sitting. The twins saw him, too but the parents were acting like he wasn’t even there. In fact, they were the only ones who couldn’t see or hear him.

“That means ‘Excuse me’,” he said in a German accent then he raised the scalpel above their heads. The twins screeched as they flew off the love seat and toward him.

The Bone Bridge- Chapter 18

2009-09-30T09:50:00.000-07:00

Chapter 18

Adam’s soft-spoken voice filled my ears and, to my surprise, tears filled my eyes. I pressed the buds closer into my ears, trying to tune out the background hiss and background chatter.

“The thing that sucks the most about what’s happened to me since the accident is that I feel like I’m failing people. I mean, I don’t exactly go out of my way to invite them into my bedroom by the dozens and it isn’t right that they try to make their problems mine. They’re not my problems. I just want my fuckin’ life back and be like everyone else.

“But I’m not like everyone else. I never was and never will be. I’m special to them and that’s why they come to me. I can’t help them all but it really depresses me that I can’t help these poor people. I mean, I’m not the only person who’s ever had a near death experience and their lives don’t turn into Ghost Busters movies. And the stories they tell me…”

“Like what stories, Adam?”

“I dunno, Oliver. My mind’s kinda gone blank all of a sudden. OK, there were these twin girls who were sittin’ on my bed just before my sister knocked on my door. They were like 16, 17. They were killed in some car wreck about a year ago. They were still worried their parents were gonna ground them even longer if they found out they snuck out.

“They were killed the same way I was almost killed along with my girlfriend; I snuck out of my house when I was grounded, too. But they didn’t even know they were fuckin’ dead, dude. They still thought the worst thing in the world was to be grounded by their parents.”

“Tell me about your girlfriend. What has she said to you?”

“If you’re looking for her to give you the four one one about what happened on Halloween night, dude, you’re shit out of luck. She wasn’t even there. She was with me in Braintree, remember?”

“Has she said anything about seeing her parents?”

“No, which I hafta admit is kinda strange. I mean, they all died suddenly. Isn’t that when ghosts haunt you, when they die with unfinished business or something?”

“That’s the theory, yes…”

The conversation kind of dragged on and nothing much of any substance was said at the café as Adam and Oliver were both taking the measure of the other. Still, I knew that a helluva lot more was being said than as if I had been there. And Adam wasn’t telling them anything that he hadn’t told me already in the two times he’d spoken to me.

Yet, it wasn’t what he said that made my eyes well up. It was how he’d said it. I could hear the bleakness and frustration breaking his voice, his frustration of not being able to help total strangers who looked to him for answers he couldn’t always give them, in asking him to solve mysteries that threatened to remain mysteries.

Kind of like in my line of work. The only difference is I have the same requests made of me by the living. And I know what it feels like to be on the other side of the desk, to ask a homicide detective to give me some answers before I go crazy and to be told, “We’re doing our best, sir, but…”

But what was said to Adam wasn’t nearly as important or as interesting as what was said behind his back while he was in the bathroom. The kid had the foresight to hide a digital recorder in his hooded sweatshirt that he’d hung right next to Oliver Blood. It was a ballsy move and there was nothing but a thin layer of fabric to hide the recording device from view.

The kid isolated the dialogue and emailed it to me in an mp3 file. He assumed that I had an mp3 player like everyone else in the digital world. The fact is I’d barely graduated from eight tracks and still hoped vinyl would make a comeback. It was true that I could’ve played the kid’s mp3 file on both my computers at work and home but I wanted something portable that I could take with me. So I went to an electronics store and looked at the bewildering array of mp3 players they had zip tied to a peg wall. Some of the fuckers were no bigger than Wheat Thins and I wondered how many of these things were lost every year and had to be replaced. Maybe that was the whole idea.

Some kid in a blue polo shirt who still looked young enough to enjoy the Power Rangers tried to talk me into getting something called an iPhone and things called apps. But all I wanted was the biggest, most outdated one they had, something that I couldn’t accidentally swallow or get caught in my eye.

After clicking my mouse and cursing at my home computer for about an hour and a half I finally discovered how to upload the damned file onto my new toy. It was smaller than a pack of cigarettes, but still conspicuous enough so that I wouldn’t leave the house without it if I needed it with me. I hadn’t the heard the file, yet, and this was the first time I’d played it.

What I heard filled me with rage. Laura and her boss still weren’t speaking completely openly on account of the few other customers who were there and who’d subsequently arrived but they were speaking openly enough so that I knew where they were planning on taking this.

“OK, he’s gone. What do you think, sir?” Apparently, the “Fuck you” schtick really was a ruse.

“Well, he’s your brother. What do you think? Do you think he’s the One?” Pause. “The One what?” I wondered. Maybe Blood was thinking along the same lines as me.

“There’s a pretty high probability. I have to say in all seriousness, sir, I’ve never seen a level of contact as I do with my brother.”

“So do you think it would be a good idea to bring him in, to meet the Others?” Sigh from Laura.

“I think it may be a good idea, even if for no other reason than to let him know that he’s not the only one.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking, Elle. Obviously, what’s happened to him since the accident is freaking him right the fuck out. Introducing him to the other adepts may be the best thing anyone can do for him.”

“Your best guess, sir: Do you think Dietrich will try to acquire him?”

“Affirmative,” Blood said immediately. “He’d be crazy to not try to make a play for him. If I was him, I would.”

“Sir, you’re not planning on using him as bait, are you?” I pressed the buds even deeper into my ears. “I mean, he’s just a kid, sir.”

“Elle, some of the adepts were even younger than him when they came in and they adjusted.”

“Not all of them, sir.”

“OK. Most of them, then.”

“I just don’t want you using him as bait. Let’s not forget, he’s my flesh and blood. I already lost a brother years ago. I have no intention of losing the only other one I have.”

“I understand that, Elle. Don’t worry. No one’s gonna tie him to a stake in Jurassic Park and wait for the raptors to get him. That’s not what we do. You know that.”

“If he does try to acquire him, what do you think Dietrich has planned for him?”

“Hell if I know, Elle. Only thing I do know is, whatever the fuck happened in Boston last month will be nothing compared to what he’s still got planned.”

“Sh. Here he comes…”

The rest of the tape was a copy of what Adam had sent me. With one exception. The digital recorder in Adam’s pullover was left on and it picked up something that, for some reason, wasn’t caught by the wire’s microphone. It was a fourth voice and at first I thought it was one of the other customers or employees in the background. I played it over and over but couldn’t make out any words. It was like a raspy whisper. It sounded as if whoever said it was standing right next to the coat rack and I know for a fact no one was because I could see it.

So later that day I took it to one of the sound engineers at the CSI lab and had him isolate and loop it, as he termed it. As already noted, it wasn’t picked up on the other audio file on my unit and the engineer confirmed it when we played them simultaneously.

Reducing the background hiss and all other ambient noise it became crystal clear what this disembodied voice was saying:

“Don’t trust him.” I wondered who was warning him and if Adam had seen who it was.

The Bone Bridge- Chapter 17

2009-09-28T07:02:00.000-07:00

Berlin, East Germany, October 1961

Eight year-old Hans Dietrich had constantly heard the phrase “Checkpoint Charlie” on East German radio and TV but seeing the soldiers, barbed wire and tanks of different armies facing each other was something else entirely. Across the No Man's Land, an American soldier smiled warmly at him from atop a halftrack and he squeezed his father’s hand a little more tightly.

“Go on, smile back at the nice man,” Fritz Dietrich told his son in English as he waved back. In response, little Hans twitched his lips in a simulacrum of a smile and the soldier gave him a playful two finger salute from behind the tank's turret.

Hans was too young to understand very much about geopolitical matters. But that obviously didn’t apply to Papa. He would tell Hans about the time the young American president recently spoke to the Soviet Premier and how Khrushchev had walked all over the vastly more inexperienced leader. The Communist propaganda mill in East Germany had played up that angle big but in this case, the propaganda happened to be true. Before Kennedy walked out of Vienna with Khrushchev’s footprints all over his back, the handsome young President could only impotently sputter in response to the impasse, “Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be a war. It will be a cold, long winter.”

Outwardly, Fritz Dietrich was a member in good standing of the Communist Party. He held the right views, publicly cheered the Soviets’ growing postwar encroachment over Europe and beyond and never missed a party meeting in his local chapter. In that respect, he was like tens of millions of middle-aged man in virtually every country: Just some poor slob trying to fit in, feed his family and not to stand out.

Unfortunately, his expertise and official standing as a scientist was a major hindrance to anonymity. As a civilian, he’d done research and development for the Nazis during the war, working on some of Hitler’s most secret projects. One of them was the Hell’s Gate project. Since virtually all research papers and test results were destroyed when the Soviets came rolling in, only a handful of people even knew of the existence of Hell’s Gate let alone the startling results. Over the last 16 years, Fritz Dietrich hoped and prayed that the Communists never knew about his collaboration with the old National Socialist Party. He was never a Nazi or a party member. He was just some poor bastard whose scientific research was being appropriated and perverted by another damned government.

Hans realized early on that his father wasn’t a Communist any more than he was a Nazi. Even while at home, he never spoke openly to his wife, son or daughter unless the radio or television was turned up loud and even when he did speak frankly he barely did so above a whisper. He would smile at them and talk about possible KGB bugs in the house and Hans would always imagine black beetles with red hammers and sickles on them. To further confound any Germans or Soviets who may be listening in, Papa would sometimes speak in English or even Esperanto, even though Hans never fully grasped the artificial language.

By this time, a formidable but still-porous wall had actually been built separating East from West Berlin. In advance of such a thing, people began fleeing East Germany and going to the West by the millions. Many of Dr. Dietrich’s colleagues and personal friends had already made the exodus and the Soviet leadership was getting more and more jittery about the “brain drain” that was already weakening the East German scientific establishment and its economy.

Little Hans couldn’t understand why the government would put up a wall and cutting a major city in two. After all, who were they trying to keep out? His father explained wryly, “Son, it’s not who they’re trying to keep out but who they’re trying to keep in.”

“Papa, why are we here? I don’t like it here. I want to go home,” he said in German.

“Look around you here, Hans,” he said by way of reply, sweeping his arm in the general direction of the barbed wire and tanks. “They call this ‘peacetime’ but this is the way Berlin looked when Hitler was in power, during the war. That Churchill fellow said that we live behind an ‘Iron Curtain’ and I cannot disagree with him.” He stopped and looked around, shaking his head then said sadly, “This is no place to raise children.”

Young as he was, Hans got the impression that his father wasn’t merely sightseeing but, rather, looking for something. He never did know if his father found it that day.

East Germany, 1967

By now, Hans was a strapping young man of 14 going on 15. Kennedy and Khrushchev were dead and out of power, respectively, but the country was even more divided when the Berlin Wall went up during the Kennedy years. As his mind grew and took in more of the world around him, Hans gradually came to understand the geopolitical conflict that bisected Germany. What he couldn’t understand was why his intellectual father chose to stay behind and to remain in a country where free thought was suppressed.

He dared asked his father that once while they were helping his mother tend the garden in their modest backyard. His father abruptly stood up and his mother and older sister shot him a look that immediately told him that he’d just stepped into No Man’s Land. His father quickly turned to him and said,

“It is a lot easier for single people and couples to sneak out than it is for entire families. It would have been dangerous to do so even before the wall went up. We will not speak of this again!”

Hans never forgot how much his face burned with chagrin. His father was generally a quiet, soft-spoken man, a true intellectual, and very few were the times he’d addressed anyone in the family so sharply. He thought it was a perfectly valid question. Why not leave? His father was plainly unhappy with his work and with what his half of his country had turned into. He knew the results of their research and tests were getting sent straight to Moscow where it could be perverted for military/intelligence applications. Hans wouldn’t know the exact nature of his father’s work until long after he suddenly died later that week.

Fritz Dietrich, as stated, never missed a local Communist party meeting. That’s not to say, however, that he stayed for the entire meetings. In fact, more often than not, he would slip out and go somewhere else after he’d documented his presence. The whole family knew what he was doing at these secret meetings if not precisely what was being discussed or where and they dreaded the nights when Communist party meetings were scheduled. There was never any guarantee that he’d walk through the door in relative high spirits carrying an apple strudel wrapped in brown butcher paper as always.

One Saturday night in 1967, Hans walked through the front door for the last time. The children no longer ran to the door as when they were younger even though they greatly looked forward to the delicious pastry that Papa would bring home for their dessert. Their mother Greta, however, always greeted him at the door and still took his hat and coat. They heard the key open the door and someone walk in. They heard their mother get up from her needlepoint to greet Papa.

Then they heard Mama scream like they’d never heard any human scream.

Hans and Kirsten looked at eachother and bolted to the foyer. They got there just a split second before their father fell on his face while their mother got down on her haunches and covered her ears as her screaming continued. Blood cascaded out of their father’s mouth and his eyes were completely red. The strudel, blood dripping on the butcher paper, fell to the ground a second before their father.

The doctor who performed the autopsy told the family that Dr. Dietrich’s aorta had suppurated or split. Occasionally that happens, he said, and that there’s nothing that can prevent it. There’d been no evidence of foul play. There were no contusions, cuts or punctures although the pathologist was surprised at the sharpness and cleanness of the split, almost, he said, “as if someone slit the artery with a scalpel.”

By 1976, Hans Dietrich began working for the Stasi and was at 23 one of the most dangerous men in East Germany. The rest of the world had moved on and grew comfortable with the idea of two Germanys, one free, the other Communist. It was a standard chestnut of the Communist propaganda mill that the Americans had failed to check Communist expansion in Germany, in Korea, in Vietnam and even in Cuba off its shores. All of Eastern Europe was Communist thanks to the ailing FDR at the Yalta conference.

As with all rookies, Dietrich started out as a glorified gopher by doing scut work for the senior officials above him. Soon thereafter, however, he began distinguishing himself with a mounting arrest rate and, even more impressively, a high conviction rate. It was astounding how many suspects that he’d brought in those first 12 months who wound up singing like canaries to him.

It seemingly never struck him that he’d become the very thing that his father had despised. And if it had, he knew what his real reasons were for joining the East German Secret Police. If he was going to solve his father’s suspicious death, he’d have to be on the inside. Then, eleven long frustrating years later, he’d gotten his big break.

A Czech intelligence asset of the American government had been picked up by the Stasi in 1987 and had the misfortune of winding up in the same interrogation room as Dietrich. His excellently-forged passport listed him as a West German national but it was obvious from the minute he opened his mouth that he wasn’t a true German. After some brutally earnest interrogation, Dietrich got it out of the Czech that he was, indeed, an asset of the American Central Intelligence Agency’s Psy Ops division.

Among other things, Dietrich discovered to his astonishment that he’d attended the same exact meeting as his father in 1967 on the night he died. He admitted that he wasn’t a regular member of the group yet had somehow successfully passed himself off back then as an authentic German who was just as committed to leaving East Germany as the other dissidents.

In subsequent interrogations it had come out that this guy, whose last name was actually Dubcek, was a highly-skilled courier who’d specialized in placing psychtronic hardware devices on unwitting victims. Dietrich thought the guy was off his rocker until he explained that both the Soviets and the Americans were working along parallel lines. The metal devices, which were often crude and resembled metal children’s toys more than weapons for psychic espionage, could channel and even amplify the powers of a remote psychic from even half a world away. They intended to go after another person posing as an East German dissident but who was in reality a Soviet spy. He just slipped the device into the wrong coat pocket: Hans’ father’s pocket. His father was murdered, said the Czech, by mistake.

Not surprisingly, the suspect soon thereafter died in Stasi custody. When his superiors asked if he’d revealed anything of interest, Dietrich shook his already platinum head and curtly said, “Nein.”

Such a device that no one in the family could recognize or identify was found in his father’s coat pocket the night he died of that esophageal hemorrhage twenty years earlier.

22 years later, Hans was holding it in his hands, furiously swallowing his tears.

The Bone Bridge- Chapter 16

2009-09-28T06:41:00.000-07:00

When Laura knocked on my door on Saturday morning, I almost wished it had been a ghost. I knew it was time and I wasn’t exactly creaming my denims to meet her boss. Plus, to make matters worse, that Coffey dude gave me a wire to wear, meaning that not only was I now doing undercover police work for free, I was also lyin’ to my own sister and risking pissing off her boss if he ever found the fucking wire.

It was a pain in the ass putting it on in the bathroom. I only have like three hairs on my chest so at least I didn’t have to worry about shaving before taping it on but it felt weird, like I had a cold insect clinging to me. Back at the skateboard park, Coffey had taken the wire out of his coat pocket and explained how to put it on. Then he asked me to call him when I was about to leave since it was just one of those one way things. I reminded him that I lost my cell phone in the accident and that using the house phone was too sketchy.

So I logged on to AOL Instant Messenger and IM’d him at the really imaginative handle of MisterCoffey. He pinged me to acknowledge that he got my message and I logged off.

I got up from the bed that I was sharing with two other ghosts, two girls about my age that were killed in a car accident about a year ago. They floated past me and through the door before I had the chance to open it and the first thing Laura said was, “Jesus, Adam, did you just feel that draft? I felt like it came right through the door!” I just shook my head and shouldered past her, eager to get this spy shit over with. “Why are you wearing a buttoned collar shirt all of a sudden?”

After I got the kid’s message on my computer at home, I made sure I got within range of the rendezvous point. Blood apparently wanted something public but not too public and they settled for a trendy coffee shop in Braintree that was long on comfort and short on customers. The idea, I guess, was to provide just enough exposure to put the kid at ease while ensuring as much as possible that their conversation wouldn’t be overheard by prying ears like mine. Without any specific reason and without knowing a blessed thing about this Blood guy, I was starting to despise him. Maybe it was because I feared that he’d try to exploit Adam. Some of it also had to do with my son Chaz. Adam looked nothing like Chaz yet there was an innocence and vulnerability about him that would’ve made me think Adam was his reincarnation if Chaz had died before Adam was born. In fact, if Chaz was still alive, he’d be just a year older than the Moss kid.

I shook the thought out of my head as I drove to the coffee shop and looked for a place where I could park without being made. Before that time, I began getting the transmission as I heard Adam’s voice and his sister over the hum of her Chevy Cobalt. The kid was getting too freaked out and I was afraid he was going to blow it.

“So, what does this dude want, Laura?”

“I… I don’t exactly know, Honey. All I know is if I was him, I’d want to get a sense of what level your powers are at right now, what you’re seeing and hearing.”

“I’m starting to get this uneasy feeling that you’re not looking for my help but that you’re trying to protect me from something. Something that you know about that you haven’t told me, yet.”

“Adam, listen, I’m your big sister. I’m your friggin’ flesh and blood, OK? You should know I’d never put you in harm’s way.” She sounded sincere and shit but I noticed that she never looked me in the eye.

“Yeah, well, not too many dudes have big sisters that work for super secret fuckin’ spy agencies, either, with bosses named Blood.”

Laura turned and gave me the stink eye like I just picked my nose and put the booger on her passenger window. Alright, maybe I shouldn’t hold the dude’s name against him. Still, just my luck the guy couldn’t have a friendlier sounding name like Flowers or Pinkerton or something like that.

“Look, it’s just an informal meet and greet. You could’ve dressed like you usually do.” She looked up and down at my chest. “I mean, I appreciate the thought and all but seeing you in a collared shirt just… doesn’t look right.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a little cold for a tee shirt. Besides you bought this for me last Christmas. Well, you mailed it to me. You never showed up.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry, Hun. Ah, here we are.”

Laura steered into a parking spot across the street from the coffee shop. I couldn’t tell whether or not her boss was already there and I looked for a black car with government plates and ninjas, guys wearing sunglasses and trench coats and snipers on the roof.

The problem with someone wearing a wire is that fabric rustles against the stalk mic. A wire’s no fucking good if someone can see it so it has to be covered up by a shirt. I’d recommended a buttoned shirt like the one he was wearing. I was well aware that I was using an untrained asset to monitor and record a conversation with some super spook that was the head of a secret intelligence outfit and that maybe he’d sweep the kid for any listening device. But I was counting on Blood giving Adam a free pass because 1) he was just a kid, not a pro and 2) he was Laura Moss’s brother and maybe Blood would count on her turning up anything beforehand.

I pressed the headphones closer to my ears and checked for the twelfth time if the digital recorder was on. Satisfied that it was, I concentrated on the feed and tried to tune out the rustling fabric and focus on the voices. I heard Laura announce their arrival and I realized I was just a couple of hundred yards away. It was a pretty nondescript café that was nestled between a pizza place and a Brazilian grocery store. Since I was coming from the other direction, I could park on the opposite side of the street as Laura. I found the perfect spot just a door away. I could get a decent visual if they sat at the right places while not giving them much chance of seeing me. Trouble is, since it wasn’t a two way setup and I had no way of communicating with Adam, I couldn’t give him any idea where I was parked unless he actively looked for me. And that could blow the whole thing.

I checked for a car with government plates unless Blood would be stupid enough to drive all the way out to Braintree in his own car. Then I recalled Laura telling me at the station that their agency’s HQ was in Washington so that meant he, too, would be driving a rented car. So I began looking for rental car plates in the small parking lot out back. There were none. What could be so interesting and important about this Moss kid that the top banana of an intelligence agency would hop on a jet for several hundred miles just to have coffee with him?

I assumed that Laura and Adam were early until I heard a deep voice say, “Adam? Hi, I’m Oliver. I’ve been waiting to meet you.”

“Uh, hello, sir,” I half said, half swallowed. The tall black dude showed me his impossibly white teeth and laughed.

“Call me Oliver, please. You don’t work for me.” Then he looked at my sister, “You still have to call me ‘sir’, though.”

“Fuck you, Oliver,” she said. My eyes must’ve gotten as big as donuts but Oliver just looked up into the fluorescent lights and laughed again. The first impression I got was that the two of them had a relationship that was a whole lot more informal than she led me to believe. And that helped put me at ease. Then again, maybe that was the intention. I never forgot what these two did for a living. Innocent people suddenly died in their line of work and all I knew was that I wanted no part of it. If Laura’s war story about that Russian chick getting croaked was supposed to put my mind at ease, then she bombed big time.

“OK, just for that, Moss, you’re payin’ for everyone else.”

Laura smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “OK, cheapskate. Any excuse to get a free coffee. This guy’s an incurable mooch. Watch out for him.” Oliver laughed for the third time in half a minute. Yeah, they were layin’ it on pretty thick and it was getting old PDQ.

She ordered a couple of lattes for herself and her boss and I settled for an ice coffee. “While we’re waiting for the coffee, let’s sit down, Adam.” He tried to steer me into a corner of the café, the part with the least people but I wanted to sit more in the middle so anyone parked right outside could see us. I looked for Coffey’s car out of the corner of my eye. He said he personally drove an old Ford Grand Victoria but I didn’t see it.

I sat on the right side of the black leather sofa and kept nervously looking out the window while pretending to look at my sister. I had no idea where this Coffey dude was. I didn’t just want him to listen in. I wanted him to be able to see me… just in case.

I didn’t know if it was serendipity or savvy on the kid’s part but he managed to position himself and Blood perfectly from where I was parked. Adam could be seen from my oblique angle while Blood’s back was turned to the front bay window. He wouldn’t be able to make me even if he saw me, anyway, but his big sister was another matter. She met me.

“So, how are you doing in school, Adam? Have you gone back, yet?”

“Yeah. I, uh, went back yesterday. My folks figured it would be better if I went back on the last day of the week just to, like, ease me back into the routine. I was gettin’ my homework sent to me.” He tossed his long bangs out of his eyes.

“Good, good,” Blood said. “Ah, here we are…”

I could see Laura cautiously walk into view holding a tray with three cups which she then placed on the table between Adam and Blood then she sat next to her brother on the couch. All I could see of her boss was the back of his head of white hair. Among the dark furnishings, he stood out like a dandelion.

“Thank you, Elle. Is your iced coffee okay, Adam?” The kid nodded his head up and down. He cradled the cup against him like it was a kitten and looked scared. I could hear the coffee and ice sloshing around and I wished he’d put it down.

“Hun, Oliver here just wants to talk to you about some of the things you’ve seen and, considering what we do for a living, I think it’s safe to say you’ll get a fairer hearing than you ever got from Dr. Sutter or Dr. Rubin.” Adam just mutely nodded again and I felt bad for him. Here I was suspicious of Blood and Elle exploiting this kid yet what the fuck was I doing? At least I could confirm that I had his best interests at heart but that was cold comfort considering how uncomfortable he looked.

“That’s right. Let me give you a basic overview of what our agency does. We’re not exactly what you call ghost hunters although we’re called upon to investigate the paranormal and to prevent certain private and government entities from perverting research into the paranormal. More often than not, we directly get leads or are tipped off by other intelligence agencies when there’s a strong probability of someone seeking to exploit that technology.”

“Yeah, I know. My sister told me a little about it.”

“OK, good. Now, considering our line of work, Elle here thought it would be prudent to tell me about your experience since your accident. She tells me you’re seeing more and more full body apparitions, that you can communicate with all of them?”

“Well, not all of them. Some of them can’t talk. But it’s obvious they’re coming out of the woodwork just to see me. I hate it. I just wish they’d go away and leave me the fuck alone.”

Blood nodded his platinum head. “Yeah, I can understand that. We’ve seen our fair share of manifestations. It takes a lot to get used to, that is, if anyone can get used to that sort of thing.”

“So, where do I come in, Mr. Blood?”

“Please, call me Oliver. Where you come in has yet to be largely determined. We know that you’ve been seeing ghosts left and right starting the moment you came out of your coma. We happen to be very interested in what happened on Halloween night in Boston, the… incident that claimed the lives of your girlfriend’s parents.” He leaned forward to take a sip of his latte and continued. “We’d like to know if the spirits of any of those victims have been talking to you and, if so, have they shed any light about what happened that night?”

Son of a bitch was thinking along the same exact lines as me. Yet something told me that this Blood character’s interest in Adam went far beyond him being a stenographer for the dead. I held my breath for a minute and hoped and prayed the kid wouldn’t let it slip that some fat Boston cop with bad taste in ties was asking the exact same questions of him. It suddenly occurred to me that I rushed out of the house without having a cup of coffee. I looked forlornly at the café next to me. How ironic is that?

“Well, uh, nothing that I can think of. Like I said, dude, they can’t all talk. And there’re so many that I kinda tend to tune ‘em out since they all drive me apeshit.” The kid took a long sip of his iced coffee then looked up and frowned. “Wait a minute. If your agency’s getting involved in this, you think what happened on Halloween night has something do with the paranormal?”

“Well, we’re not officially involved, yet, Adam. We were tipped off by the FBI. Don’t forget, there were senators and congressmen in that high rise so that automatically gets the federal government involved. You’d be surprised how many of our so-called leads turn into doggie doo doo. More often than not, it’s not remotely paranormal.”

Then he regaled Adam with a story about a woman who claimed to be haunted by ghosts only to find out her husband was manufacturing the hauntings by using hidden speakers and piano wires to make things move. Apparently the idea was to drive his wealthy wife insane and to the point of suicide so he could collect the inheritance. As an investigator myself, I know all too well that not all investigations bear fruit. I never told the Moss kid about the autopsy results and I specifically told Elle back at the station to pay her kid brother the same courtesy. He didn’t need to know about hearts being torn apart and people pierced with ghost swords. The poor kid was freaked out enough these days as it was. I was counting on Blood to be equally considerate.

“Still, why this? Where didja get the idea there could be something paranormal about this?”

“Well, at first glance, Adam, it looks like a mass suicide. But not a whole hell of a lot adds up. What would make all those people jump from a penthouse dozen of stories up? There wasn’t a fire, gas leak, shooting or any kind of terrorist attack that would account for that kind of sheer, blind panic. We’re just covering our bases.”

Through the glass I could make out just enough of the kid’s facial features to know he wasn’t buying it. In fact…

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”

In fact, the kid whispered the word “bullshit” into the mic. Good boy. Teach them skepticism early, I say. Then Adam took off his hooded sweatshirt, hung it up on the coat rack and announced he was going to the bathroom.

He began muttering into the microphone as soon as he was out of their earshot.

“Dude, I don’t buy this shit for a minute. There’s, like, so much they’re not telling me.” I nodded and silently agreed with him. Now that he was no longer there, they were no doubt talking amongst themselves. I was looking right at them. Unfortunately, with Adam no longer there, I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

As if reading my mind, the kid then said, “I figgered if I left them alone, they’d start talking. I know what you’re thinking, dude, but don’t worry. I got that covered.”

I frowned in puzzlement and wondered what he was talking about then I looked at the hooded sweatshirt still hanging on the coat rack. Elle and Blood continued talking and weren’t paying it any mind.

“Oh, this kid is good,” I chuckled out loud.

The Bone Bridge, Chapter 15

2009-09-27T14:41:00.000-07:00

Chapter Fifteen
(November 2nd 2009, eight days ago)

“Define ‘exploded’”, I said to Dr. Albert Tomlinson, ME.

“Well, it’s kind of an unscientific term, Ed, but that’s basically what happened to these people. Their hearts just… exploded. Atria, arteries. In 14 cases, the various parts of the heart just suppurated.”

A cadaver still covered by a slightly blood-stained sheet lied between the portly medical examiner and me. It’s a cliché in the movies, I know, about the homicide detective visiting the coroner or ME during a murder investigation but the truth is we’re often called upon to do just this. It’s one thing to dispassionately read an autopsy report, look at toxicology results, free histamine levels and so forth and look at morgue photos but sometimes the only way to get a real sense of what actually happened, if not how, is to see the body itself no matter how gruesome it is. Thankfully, Tomlinson was enough of a professional to avoid the Hollywood ME stereotype by not resting a sandwich on the chest of the corpse. He was, however, relishing a 12” meatball sub on honey wheat that he got from the Subway shop down the street.

“14 out of the 23 who were still in the penthouse?”

“Uh, not exactly. And that’s the strangest thing, too.”

I hadn’t yet read the results of the one file that Tomlinson had just put in my hands. “What do you mean? It actually gets stranger?”

“Oh yeah. In two other cases with the body bombs…” I winced as he used that term. That’s what the NYFD called the poor bastards who jumped out of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and I always hated that phrase. “In the cases of Senator Dumont and Congressman Feingold, there was the same cardiac suppuration that we’d seen with the penthouse victims.”

“Could traumatic deceleration account for that? They were a couple of dozen floors up.”

“Mmm,” Tomlinson hummed with a cynical wince, “it’s possible but not too likely. Even from that height, the internal organs are still pretty heavily shielded by the musculature, the rib cage and so forth. In the most extreme cases of traumatic deceleration, you’d see, at most, a tearing of connective tissue in some of the internal organs. But nothing to compare to this degree of suppuration. And even if a fall from that height could account for the suppuration, then how do we explain the penthouse victims? Let me show you something…” Then Tomlinson pulled off his blood-stained latex gloves and turned his back to me while he briefly washed and dried his hands. Walking to a corner of the lab, he picked up a plastic model of the human heart.

“Now, look at this training tool. You can just remove the various atria and arteries and so forth almost like a puzzle. That’s the closest I can come to describing what my assistants and I had discovered.” To prove his point, he removed a ventricle or something and put it back in its proper place. “I’ll tell you the truth, Ed, it’s cases like this that make me wonder if I should’ve become a vet or dentist instead. Medical forensics is a frighteningly exact science to a lot of criminals and laymen while there’s still a lot we don’t know about the human body.

“But for the life of me, Ed, I cannot give you one good scientific or even logical reason why or how this could happen to a human heart even considering the physically traumatic perimortem circumstances. It’s almost as if… I dunno, as if someone noninvasively reached into their chest cavities and took apart their cardiac tissue by intelligent design. The two that puzzle me are the senator and the congressman. They were in free fall. And don’t even get me started on those clean wounds on several of the bodies.”

Even keeping an open mind, I still had no clue as to how that could’ve happened. “Yeah, and their angle of descent proves that they didn’t just keel over and fall through the window. They actually jumped. They couldn’t have done that if they were already dead.”

“True. Unless they were thrown out.”

“Nah. We’ve reviewed the security tapes from the lobby. Nobody who wasn’t cleared got up to that penthouse. And I can’t believe that members of Congress and captains of industry would start throwing each other out of high-rise windows.”

“You’ve also never think until the night before last that any of them would willingly jump from those windows, leaving their spouses behind in some cases, and that their organs would come undone on the way down.”

Tomlinson had a point. Once again, I felt like the village idiot that had my hat snatched from my head and kept behind me by a jeering crowd of tormenters no matter how many times I whirled around.

OK, suppose we’re talking about an intelligent entity taking apart the senator’s and congressman’s cardiac tissue. Whatever… creature that could accomplish that would have to do so while the victims were in freefall and accelerating at the rate of 66 feet per second. What the fuck could do something like that? What could be that predatory and tenacious? I wasn’t exactly eager to find out.

(November 10th 2009)

By this time I and the growing task force was armed with the autopsy reports of all 53 victims. I say “armed” in a semi-facetious sense. Actually it was like being armed with handguns and rifles with no ammo or weapons from an alien technology. The facts led us nowhere that anyone was willing to go. The Ritz Carlton massacre was getting out of control in the press because neither the mayor’s office nor the Boston City PD could come up with any credible spin or story that would account for everything. Conspiracy theories were being floated on TV, radio, the print media and, Lord help us, blogs. Was it chemical or biological terrorism like nerve gas or anthrax, were they poisoned, was it some new, more virulent strain of Legionnaire’s Disease? Inquiring yet stubbornly uninformed minds wanted to know.

I think I can lay a pretty good claim to be the loneliest detective in America because I was reluctantly working my way down a road that was not only the one less traveled but one overgrown and blocked with foliage, mountains and healthy, human skepticism. Because if I was to come forward and let the other detectives on the task force know what my pet theory was, they’d either put me on the rubber gun squad or on a permanent vacation in a rubber room. I could just imagine it now.

Chief, we got him. Put an APB out on a ghost who has medical knowledge and can fly a couple of hundred miles an hour…

Yet as crazy as it sounded, it was still better than the idiotic theories being floated around the office by the other clowns. Roddy had the stupidest one of all: It was some new super virus that had been introduced into the ventilation duct work of the hotel, which would explain why the Boston Fire Department wouldn’t have found it since they were looking for carbon monoxide and other common contaminants. Yet that brilliant example of ratiocination didn’t explain why we were still alive with our internal organs intact after freely walking around the penthouse or why such a surgically-savvy virus never showed up in the blood work done by the coroner’s office.

Still, the easiest and most convenient explanation that could be floated was that this was an act of terrorism. Considering the social standing of the 50+ victims (almost all of whom were millionaires, including one billionaire), the likelihood of this being a random, tragic accident just didn’t fly, if you’ll pardon the phrase. After all, terrorists attacked our financial and military infrastructure on 9/11 and Flight 93’s crash in a barren field in Pennsylvania was only incidental. They could’ve been headed to the White House or elsewhere in Washington, DC.

But there was no telling how the public would react if the Boston City PD and the mayor’s office announced that terrorism accounted for all the deaths of 53 of our most high profile citizens. In this paranoid post-9/11 nation of ours, I’d heard stories of toddlers getting kicked off airplanes for waving bye bye to the planes still on the tarmac and Sikhs getting detained at the departure gates because the minimum wage-earning organ donors hired by Homeland Security thought they were Muslims.

Yeah, terrorism would go over real well. Yet, this was exactly what we were probably looking at. The only difference between me and the rest of the task force was that I was looking at a theory that was somewhat more unconventional than the chief of detectives would have liked. And after my conversation with the Moss kid’s older sister, I got the closest thing yet to confirmation that what happened at the Boston Ritz Carlton on Halloween night was definitely not explainable by conventional means.

So I wanted to be a fly on the wall when that kid got to meet his sister’s boss, this Oliver Blood character. I ran a BOP or a background check on this bozo and got nowhere. Nothing there, nothing on NCIC, not even shit on him on Google. In a way, this guy, too, was like a ghost. I was interested in knowing if this bird even existed. That’s why at the skateboard park in Braintree I gave the Moss kid a wire to wear with instructions on how to use it and expressly forbade him from telling his sister about it. When this Blood character had his little face-to-face with Adam, I absolutely wanted to be there. I trusted Elle and her mysterious boss about as far as I could throw Langley and hated getting in as deep with her and her agency than I already was. The very fact that I gave her as much confidential information as I did is in itself a testament as to how desperate I was for answers and insight.

The Bone Bridge- Chapter 14

2009-09-26T08:16:00.000-07:00

Chapter Fourteen

“OK, Adam, same rules apply. This better not wind up on your Facebook page. No one would believe you, anyway.”

“Sis, gimme some credit, OK?”

“Anyway, I’m fresh out of training and I get assigned to just my second case. You ever hear about Soviet experiments in the paranormal?”

“Sure. I watched every documentary about the paranormal that I could find the first time I got out of the hospital.”

“OK. So my second assignment involves safeguarding this Russian who was seeking asylum. She was a very highly-prized asset of the Soviets and their psychotronics division…”

“What’s psychotronics?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. Don’t interrupt.”

“OK, OK.”

“So she comes here ostensibly attached to a Russian delegation for a chess match taking place in New York City. But they’re not there for chess. Somehow, she slips her handlers and reaches the State Department requesting asylum. Pretty soon, Justice gets involved then, finally, the CIA.

“Now, the CIA’s position on paranormal research isn’t just an official one. They really underestimate the advances that were made by the Soviets in that field. So they handed it off to us. That’s what we do.”

“Wait a minute. You’ve only been working for the government for a few years. Didn’t the USSR, like, collapse about 20 years ago?”

“Yes but that doesn’t mean the Russians didn’t continue their research in these parascientific disciplines. It continued straight through during Gorbachev, then Yeltsin all the way down to Putin. And this woman was part of the proof why. They weren’t about to throw away all those results and discoveries when they could still be used to tip the balance of world power.

“So this woman, whose first name was Galina, approached us, asking for political asylum. She’s all freaked out about some project the Russians were working on, something having to do with remote assassinations.”

“Remote assassinations? You mean like snipers?”

“Well, no, not exactly. This woman, and our agency tested her, had the ability to affect organic matter from a great distance. All she needed was a picture and little else and by using remote viewing, she was able to home in on that person no matter where on the planet they were.

“Then she would go to work on them. We still don’t completely understand how she was able to do it or what she used to key on these people. Even she didn’t pretend to understand it. All she knew was that she could do it and how to do it. Back when she was a teenager, they placed a frog in front of her. It was tied down so it couldn’t move. They had an EKG hooked up to it so they could monitor its heartbeat. Without touching it, she concentrated on it and was able to actually slow down or speed up its heart rate. Eventually, she stopped the frog’s heart entirely. We actually saw the file footage after the Soviet Union fell and read copies of the notes that were taken.

“So she was trained to do this to people at greater and greater distances until finally they honed and somehow amplified her abilities to the point where she could actually kill someone from thousands of miles away. It required a hell of a lot of effort. It would take her hours just to track the person down. The further away they were, the more time and effort it took. Then, when she got a lock on them, she would have to rest for about half a day.”

“Suppose the person started moving again while she was resting?”

“Didn’t matter. She had a lock on them, just like a laser-guided missile locks on a moving target. She just developed some connection to them that only she could break. Anyway, she’d done a couple of remote assassinations for the Russians until she realized she couldn’t do it anymore. That was the reason they attached her to that Russian delegation. They wanted to get her in the head of the Russian dissident who was the reigning world chess champion. Remember Vasiliy Tochilkin, the Russian expatriot?”

“Uh, sounds familiar.”

“He was the guy they wanted to lose. If she killed him by bursting a blood vessel, so much the better. For political reasons, they didn’t want him beating the Russian champion. But she slipped away before the first match.”

“So we vetted her, tested her, took down all the information she knew about the Russians’ psychtronic research. She was the real deal, Adam. We brought in federal prisoners and had her tested on them and she could do to them everything she claimed she could.”

“You used human guinea pigs??”

“Adam, they were violent prisoners with no chance of rehabilitation. This was their one shot to do something positive for society.”

“Did she kill any of them?”

“No. That would’ve defeated the purpose of her defecting. But she fucked up their heart beats something fierce. Some of the inmates were complaining of PVCs or irregular heart rates months after the experiments.”

“So where do you come in?”

“My job… My job was to guard her physically, and to look for signs that someone else with her abilities couldn’t reach her psychically. As far as Galina and our agency knew, there was no one who came close to having her abilities. Still, we kept a close eye on her. Or we thought we did.”

“What happened?”

Elle sighed and looked down at her interlocked fingers.

“Someone did reach her. On my watch. Just because she was a prized asset in their psychic research and development program doesn’t mean she was privy to classified information involving other subjects any more than a lab rat knows what’s going on in the next cage. They had someone who was at least as deadly as she was.

“She…collapsed one day while we were testing her in what we thought was a safe lab. Galina was dead before she fell out of the chair. The autopsy revealed that her heart literally exploded or came undone. The ME said he’d never seen anything like it before. She died right in front of me, Adam.

“To Oliver’s credit, he didn’t blame me. He couldn’t. After all, I’m what the adepts at the agency call a gentile. How ironic is that?”

“A gentile?”

“That’s what they call those of us who don’t have paranormal abilities like telekinesis, psychic, or psychotronic powers.

“So, that was how my second assignment ended up. She’s still the only one I ever lost and while I don’t blame myself for Galina’s death, there’s still this… stubborn sense of responsibility that I can’t shake, as if I should’ve or could’ve done more.”

“Sis, you couldn’t do more.”

“I know that, Adam. But that woman died literally on my watch. It was all so… sudden.”

“So she was killed by another remote assassin?”

“Well, that’s what we thought at first. But then when we reviewed the security tape we realized that things weren’t adding up. First, when a subject is the victim of a remote assassination, there are warning signs. It doesn’t happen all at once. The subject will complain of headaches, being distracted, chest pains, whatever. With Galina, there was none of that. But she didn’t have a simple heart attack. Her heart literally exploded from inside. That just doesn’t happen in real life, Adam.”

“What did kill her?”

“We still don’t know. But she managed to get out one word: Jodl.”

“Yodel?”

“After some research, we realized that there was a Nazi doctor named Heinrich Jodl who did experiments in vivisectioning during WW II.”

“Wait a minute. Isn’t that like carving up people while they’re still alive?”

“Exactly. But Jodl committed suicide when the Russians liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.”

“Good.”

“Well, here’s the kicker. A guy we’ve been tracking for about two years now, some East German prick named Hans Dietrich, former secret policemen, went to Buchenwald a few years ago on a ghost safari, paid for by the unified German government. There’d been reports that Jodl was still haunting the place and actually hurting tourists. After Dietrich did his thing, there were no more Jodl sightings. That was the year before Galina defected.”

“So you think this Yodel guy did this to the Russian chick?”

“Can’t tell you. How can you prove something like that? But if that is the case, it’s pretty frightening on a couple of levels.”

“Yeah. It means you have an East German Commie who’s using ghosts to kill people for whatever Commies may be left in Russia.”

“Exactly. And that’s why we’re so interested in what happened at the Ritz Carlton in Boston on Halloween night. Several of the victims died the same way Galina did.”

“You mean…?”

The Bone Bridge: Chapter 13

2009-05-05T11:01:00.000-07:00

OK, I shouldn’t be weirded out on my own birthday any more than anyone else should be. But I’m beginning to think that maybe Dr. Sutter and Dr. Rubin were right back at the psycho ward when they said I was some kinda crazy. To tell you the truth, I’m starting to think that either I am certifiably batshit or I can do more than just see, hear and talk to ghosts.

That Coffey dude offered me a lift back to my house but I thanked him and said I’d rather hang with my friends. So we boarded a bit, some of them wished me a happy birthday and Ramon, one of the kids who was at Clarissa’s party, the one who fell flat on his face, even gave me a digital audio recorder so I could record some ghosts for him. At first, it seemed like a selfish thing for him to do but then I started looking at it from his point of view. Ghost Hunters on the Sci Fi Channel helped clue a lotta people into the facts and theories of the paranormal. So now fans of the show know the lingo and about EVP’s and shit like that. So I took Ramon’s present and thanked him.

Eventually, I decided to leave the park. Since I lost my iPhone and my folks had no way of reaching me, I guessed if I didn’t head home right then I’d get an earful. Just ‘cuz it’s your birthday doesn’t mean that it’s all about you. When people spend money, time and energy puttin’ your party together, it eventually becomes all about them.

I was rolling on a dip in the street on the way back home when I heard a woman scream. It was 3 o’clock and I remember the time ‘cuz my watch’s alarm went off right then to remind me to be home by three like my folks said. I stepped on the back of my board and came to a sudden stop and listened.

“No, no! Please! Don’t!”

It was definitely a chick, one who was scared shitless like she was about to get the crap knocked out of her or something. I picked up my board and walked toward an alley near where her screaming was coming from.

“Oh, God, no! Please don’t!”

I looked around for a cop and nodded to myself. “Yep, when you really need one, where the fuck are they?” I turned around and looked into the alley again, already freaking out over what I’d find.

“N-n-no!” Louder, more frightened. Shit, I couldn’t not do anything. I walked in and yelled, “Hey! What’s the fuck’s goin’ on in there? I’ve got a cop with me!” Right. Like anyone with half a brain would fall for that. Then I saw her behind a dumpster.

She was a young black lady, maybe in her early-mid twenties, flat on her back and she was beating and kicking like she was having a seizure or something but I didn’t see anyone else there.

“Hey, are you alright, Miss? What’s the matter?” She kept her eyes fixed on something or someone that was right on top of her and she ignored me like I wasn’t even there. And, in a way, I wasn’t.

I walked over to where she was struggling, looking around again and kneeled down to her and my hand went through her shoulder to the wet pavement. She never looked at me or gave any sign of my presence. It was just like… Oh, shit, I thought, this is a residual haunting. Finally her arms and legs almost stopped moving as if two pairs of invisible restraints like they use in the mental ward were put over them. Her arms seemed to be held back over her head like someone was forcing them down. Then her skirt shot up over her waist by itself. If this was a residual haunting of a rape and I could see her and not the dude doing it, that meant she was murdered.

One of the suckiest things about being in my position is that when you see shit like this going down, you feel so damned helpless. You have to see people in their last moments on earth and you know there isn’t a fucking thing you can do to help them. You can’t even comfort them as they keep replaying what’s probably the most horrible moment in their life. This woman was raped and killed and I seemed to recall something like this happening about five, six years ago. The police never solved it.

I yelled, “Stop it!” even though I knew damned good and well that no one in this ghostly snuff film could hear me. I had no idea if she was raped by one guy or gang-raped. My hands pawed at the air over her body, hoping to grab hold of whoever was hurting her. The sense of being totally useless was one of the worst things I’ve ever experienced. It was like trying to fight history, something that had already gone down, literally fighting ghosts.

She kept screaming when her panties began to tug down by themselves and I remembered Ramon’s digital recorder so I whipped it out and hit the “record” button. What the fuck else could I do? I was hoping maybe if her voice came out on the tape, she’d give a clue as to who raped and killed her. Then I’d get labeled a nut job by the Braintree PD after telling them where it came from. Finally a cut developed across her throat and blood began spraying on me. No, not on me. Through me like I was the ghost and not her, landing on the pavement. Her legs began kicking again but her movements just got slower and slower until finally she lay still staring up into the sky.

I was shaking even worse than I did when I saw that Bruley dude hang himself in the bathroom because this wasn’t something involving one person who made a really fucked up choice. This was a murder, plain and simple, the most brutal kind. It didn’t matter much to me if this was live or Memorex. It’s still traumatizing no matter how old the crime.

I looked around the alley just in case I could catch a ghostly glimpse of her murderer then when I looked down, she was gone. I played the tape back and, I’ll be fucked runnin’, her voice came out almost as clear as mine. I didn’t think Ramon would be hearing this one. It would give him more nightmares than even I usually have.

I walked out of the alleyway and my watch’s alarm went off. I lifted my wrist to my face and my watch said it was 3 o’clock. Again. What the fuck? How’s that possible? That’s not supposed to happen with a digital watch, hell, any watch. Clocks and watches aren’t supposed to run backwards.

If I didn’t know any better, and maybe I didn’t, I’d swear that I regained whatever time I spent in the alley.

Laura, Mr. and Mrs. Moss, Rabbi Green and several family friends all yelled, “SURPRISE!” when Adam came through the door, even though it was anything but a surprise. In fact, he’d already seen the garland that said “Happy 18th Birthday, Adam!” that stretched across the hallway and even watched them blow up the personalized Mylar balloons that said basically the same thing. His family had sprung for a half sheet cake of his favorite - Chocolate with whipped cream frosting. Yet, no sooner than the echo from the greeting died down Adam slammed the front door shut and ran upstairs as if they weren’t there. A second later, his bedroom door slammed shut.

A stunned silence took hold over the hallway then Mr. and Mrs. Moss began making embarrassed apologies to Rabbi Green and the others. His mother was about to go upstairs with a full head of steam when Laura interceded and said, “I’ll talk to him, Ma. You stay down here and keep the guests entertained."

For an eerie moment, Laura felt like Arbogast, the Martin Balsam character in Psycho as he made his slow climb to mortality up the stairs to Mrs. Bates’ room. She knew her kid brother wasn’t into murdering people while wearing Mom’s dresses and, despite her horrible new hairstyle, she didn’t even own a wig. Still, she had no idea what she’d find that would explain Adam’s extraordinary rudeness. She knocked on his door.

“Adam? It’s me, Honey. May I come in?”

“Go away,” came the strained response.

She came in, anyway. Why don’t people ever listen and just go away when they’re asked to? It’s just like when you tell someone not to look down and they do it anyway. It doesn’t matter if they’re scared of heights. The idiots will always look down knowing damned good and well it’ll freak them the fuck out.

“Adam, what’s going on? You knew we were throwing a party for you. I mean, forget about Mom, Dad and me. Rabbi Green and the Goldens are down there.”

“I don’t care!” I said.

“Jesus Christ, you’re crying. Adam, what happened? Are they back again?” I told my sister that Clarissa came by last night while leaving out the part about my cherry maybe, maybe not getting popped and that I was given a breather from the Others.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Laura.” But I told her anyway, as briefly as possible, trying to keep the fucked up image of her throat getting cut all by itself. I couldn’t do it. It’s like when something violent and traumatic happens to you and these flashbacks keep arriving in front of your eyes and you can’t control it. It’s sort of like that. I left out the part about regaining the five minutes because I didn’t know what to make of or if I was hallucinating that, too.

“You know, Adam, solitude’s rarely the way to go when you experience something traumatizing.” I ignored her. I really, truly, didn’t want to relive it by talking about that lady’s rape and murder and I resented Laura for making do that. “OK, you don’t have to discuss it any more. But let me tell you a story about something that happened to me when I first became a field agent after my training. Okay?” I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my hood and nodded like I didn’t give a rat’s ass about her story because I didn’t.

She walked to the far side of my room and sat backwards on my computer chair so the back was against her chest. Laura sometimes does masculine things like that. Maybe she does it to make an impact on people that she interrogates, considering she does that for a living. She thought for a bit before she started talking.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter 12

2009-05-01T07:33:00.000-07:00

John LeRoy Drive, Braintree, MA, November 13th

Dude, I can’t tell you how great it felt to be out of that fucking psycho ward and back on my board. One of the things I learned is that the more I move and the faster I do it, the harder it is for Them to follow me. It was Friday and all the kids were still at school so I decided before my folks could throw me a lame party that would just keep me pinned in our haunted house, to hop back on my board and get some moves in. So far, I hadn’t seen anyone who looked like they didn’t have a pulse.

I did an Ollie just to see if I lost anything and was happy to see that I hadn’t. Then I one-legged my board up the incline and gave myself some rolling space before turning an Ollie into a grind rail. Like so many things in life, it started out alright then I lost my balance and slipped off one side of the rail onto the cement.

This was one of the other reasons why I wanted to come here when no one else was around. After 2 o’clock when all the other kids got here after school, that bogus move was something I wouldn’t have lived down. That’s why I spazzed out when I realized I wasn’t alone. Just as I was getting up, I saw a big dude standing in front of me and I almost thought he was one of Them until I recognized him. It was that cop from Boston and he was holding my skateboard with one hand and reaching out to me with his other. I got up on my own and brushed off my pants.

“You OK, kiddo?”

“Uh, yeah. You’re Mr. Coffey, right?” He laughed.

“Like I haven’t heard that one before.” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. “I got sick and tired of people calling me Mr. Coffey. That’s why I became a detective. It was easier than becoming Doctor Coffey.”

“Oh, I get it. Heh. So, what can I do for you?”

“Your folks said you’d probably be here. I want to talk to you about something.”

“About what?”

“Your invisible friends. I’m a believer.”

Maybe it was just the natural adolescent instinct to distrust cops but I would think with only one other person in the world who believed he was seeing ghosts, Adam would be more willing to talk to me. What worried me was that, if this Dietrich character ever got wind of him, maybe he’d believe his claims, too, and seek to exploit them. I was mindful of the fact that this whole thing, if it was for real, began with their grandfather’s research back in the 60’s. That plus Laura basically making a living that prevented people from perverting that research and her kid brother seeing swarms of spooks and his connection to one of the families that died at the Sheraton somehow put this family squarely in the middle of our investigation. When you’ve been a cop as long as me, you’re not quite as big a believer in coincidence and serendipity as others.

We sat down on a bench at the skateboard park that perhaps would’ve been better put to use in the Tower of London on account of the hard wood torturing my back. A piece of shrapnel in my lumbar in Kuwait during Desert Storm left me with a nagging back injury that made me an enemy of the sitting position in any chair or even sofa for an extended period of time. Then again, my injured back was a more accurate barometer than anything used by the National Weather Service. Yet I decided to talk to him in an environment in which he’d be the most comfortable, so I and not he would look like the fish out of water. And I couldn’t possibly imagine an environment in which a 48 year-old detective looked more out of place than in a skateboard park with a live-action anime character.

“So why do you of all people believe me?” he asked, tossing his long bangs out of his eyes. I always hated that stupid Emo boy cut. Long in the front, short in the back, it makes the kids who wear it look as if their barber got bored and walked away before they were done. “I mean, it isn’t like cops are known for believing in supernatural shit. You dudes have a hard enough time taking psychics seriously even when they solve crimes for you.”

“Well, kiddo, like in all professions and all walks of life, some people are just more open-minded than others. But I’ll tell you what made a believer out of me…” and I told him about what I saw on the security video. The kid was a little startled to discover that he was videotaped but seemed to be put at ease after a while now that it was documented he wasn’t seeing things.

“Plus, your sister’s been telling me that your house seems to be infested with spirits that only you can see and hear. That it landed you in the hospital again.”

“It’s fucking crazy, dude,” he said, pawing his bangs out of his big green eyes again. “The ones that I think bug me the most these days are the little kids, the ones that died young. I mean, you try ignoring them when they look up at you beggin’ you to help them find their parents and their homes.”

I never stopped to consider the psychological damage, the sheer angst that was added to what was already ordinary teen angst to anyone who saw ghosts as often as he did. Not that anyone should be expected to have off-the-rack empathy for such people.

“Are any of them here with you right now?” He looked around then I looked around, not that I’d see any of them.

“Not at the moment. In fact, I haven’t seen any of them since… last night.”

“Look, I know it’s impossible to listen to all of them when they’re all talking at the same time. But try to remember: Have any of them contacted you about what happened at the Sheraton last Halloween, anyone who’d identified themselves as having been killed there that night?”

Adam just shook his head with a wide-eyed expression of innocent confusion and for a very unmanly second I wanted to reach over and wrap him up in a hug and let him know that he was far from being alone. Mine and Beatrice’s son Chaz would’ve been almost his age if he was… I pinched off that thought as I tried to put my mind back on the job. I knew why my protective instincts would emerge whenever I saw or heard about this kid but I tried to put as much distance between the reasons why and myself as possible.

“The closest I think I’ve come to talking to anyone like that was…” He bit his full lower lip and seemed reluctant to tell me. I tried not to press but I leaned closer to him. “Clarissa’s ghost said something back at the hospital about freeing them. She said, ‘Free us.’ At first I thought she said ‘Frias’, like in a Portuguese name.”

I know it’s a cliché but sometimes shivers do run up spines and this time was no exception. Laura gave me the heads up that this Dietrich asshole may very well be shanghaiing ghosts and using them at places like the Sheraton. If there was some sort of a network in the netherworld, perhaps word got out that someone in our plane of existence was kidnapping the dead. And, for some reason, they’d decided Adam Moss was their savior and that he’d free them.

Just ‘cuz I saw all the Matrix movies and liked them didn’t mean I was buying into this bullshit I was hearing from this cop that I was the One, some real-life Neo.

“Look, it’s just a theory and a wild one, at that, I admit. Maybe you’re not their Moses who’s going to lead them to the Promised Land and it could be they’re seriously misguided.”

“Fuckin’ A,” I said. “I mean, I just turned 18 today and I can’t go one month without winding up at the Principal’s office for fucking up in some way.”

“You’re birthday’s today?”

“Yeah,” I said while looking at my Reeboks. As I rolled my skateboard back and forth, I kinda smiled to myself when I remembered what Clarissa did for me last night. For some reason, I wasn’t scared of her like the Others because I knew that, dead or alive, her heart was a good one and always in the right place. After all, she did promise me she’d pop my cherry. Of course, the circumstances weren’t quite what I had in mind, but…

“Well, happy birthday, kiddo. I guess I should’ve known.”

“You didn’t see the party decorations in the house when you talked to my folks?”

“No, I never got past the front door, actually. I talked to your Dad on the porch.”

“Was my sister home? She’s driving a rented Chevy Cobalt.”

“I didn’t see one in the driveway.”

“Shit, then she doesn’t know you’re talking to me.”

“Why should that matter? The decision is ultimately up to…”

“My folks are hopelessly out of the loop, dude. Besides, I just turned 18 today. You don’t even need their permission to talk to me anymore. I’m no longer a minor.”

“OK, but why should it matter if your big sister knows I’m talking to you?”

“Look, I dunno what she told you back at the police station but she’s plannin’ on hookin’ me up with some dude named Oliver Blood. I’m scared shitless about meeting this guy. He’s her boss, the head honcho at her agency. And I’m not thinking she’s sketched out to get more people involved in this.”

“Why is she setting up a meeting with you and her agency head?”

“I dunno. But I’m gettin’ the feeling she’s not tellin’ me everything, Detective Coffey. She says I can help them but I think she knows something I don’t and is trying to get her agency to protect me.”

Protect and to serve? Possibly. But I also was afraid she was planning on using her kid brother as bait to draw out that Dietrich prick, maybe even to exploit him. If occasionally crossing swords with government spooks in my eight years in the Green Berets had taught me one thing, it’s this: Don’t trust the bastards. In fact, after my experience with intelligence types, I wouldn’t trust them to watch a pile of dog shit. They’ll not only put an American flag on top of it but also try to get their dogs to shit in other peoples’ back yards so they could put Old Glory on top of them, too.

Despite my military and police background, Laura Moss gave me the heebie jeebies and I’m still not even sure what exactly her agency does. Of course, I didn’t share my concerns with the kid so he’d be more freaked out than he already was. I also didn’t want him to distrust his own sister more than he already did. That was my job. Yet, the mere suspicion that she would even consider using her innocent kid brother as bait and to perhaps exploit him for their own ends made my dick burn. Bottom line: When Adam talked to this Oliver Blood character, I wanted to be there in one way or another.

The school buses were circulating throughout Braintree and disgorging kids into the cold. A few hardy souls were making their way toward the skating park and already taking note of me so I decided to wrap it up.

“You know what’s one of the cool things about being a cop, Adam?” I asked as I stood up and arched my aching back.

“What’s that?”

“Wearing a wire.”

The Bone Bridge: Chapter 11

2009-05-01T07:24:00.000-07:00

The Sheraton Massacre was also called “The Who’s Who Mass Suicide” by some of the national media but Hans Dietrich was also assembling a Who’s Who of his own. It wasn’t always easy getting the entities that he wanted and it usually required an invitation from the owner or proprietor of a haunted venue before they could go hunting. Plus, they preferred to get paid. Thanks to their publicity-shy benefactor, it wasn’t as if they needed the money but some transfer of cash for their services made their mission at least look legitimate and businesslike.

There were some ghosts that he still would’ve loved to have. The reasons for not getting such entities in his supernatural stable were various: Either they’d made their peace before being executed and weren’t available, the place they occupied wasn’t readily accessible, they simply didn’t wish to make appearances in our dimension or they were too damned slippery. Sometimes it was as if word got out what Dietrich had planned for them.

Maniacs such as Karl Panzram, Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper and his personal favorites, countrymen Joseph Mengele and Peter Kurten, aka the Dusseldorf Ripper, forever eluded him for one reason or another. Luckily, the world always provided itself with a surfeit of killers and mass murderers.

There was one guy they’d captured six or seven years ago who still claims to this day to be Vlad the Impaler. Considering his alleged antiquity, there was no way to verify that but the results were stunning. Vlad was able to create momentarily solid objects such as petards or stakes literally out of thin air and he’d succeeded in actually impaling a couple of subjects in trial runs. That ability alone made him a very highly-prized asset. Even the multi-talented Mursi al Islamiyah hadn’t demonstrated such abilities.

As one could reasonably expect from someone possessed of such technology, there were a few professional torturers and mad doctors in the poisonous mix. While he may not have been able to obtain the services of Mengele, the Nazi “Angel of Death”, Dietrich and his team were able to get from the ruins at Buchenwald Mengele’s friend and colleague in the weird sciences Major Heinrich Jodl.

In some ways, Jodl was an even more impressive piece of work than Mengele, as his notorious reputation as a pioneer of modern-day vivisection attested. Jodl would prove to be especially useful in situations where there were to be Jews involved. Jodl, if anything, hated and feared Jews even moreso than Dietrich, which was saying something. When the battle-hardened Third Army stormed the prison and liberated it in April 1945, General "Blood and Guts" Patton himself had actually vomited when they saw the results of Jodl’s “work” in his laboratory. If he could manifest his old surgical tools, he’d almost be more valuable to Dietrich than Vlad. As it was, on test subjects, Jodl would burrow into a living person’s body and essentially turn them inside out as with his late colleague in that castle in Dublin, Ireland. Or, in one notable instance, Jodl had merely scrambled the subject’s insides without exposing the organs. It was refreshing to see a dedicated professional who wouldn’t let death put an end to his medical curiosity.

Mursi al Islamiyah also wasn’t his first terrorist acquisition. The one that had cost his team a member was Seamus Hannigan, a “Real IRA” bomber who had a flair for the dramatic. Hannigan was killed a few years ago trying to smuggle VX nerve agent out of the United States. Even though he was killed across the Atlantic, his ghost haunted the ruins of a castle in Dublin, for some unknown reason. Or it did until Dietrich and Associates, Inc. came visiting.

And then there was the usual garden variety of anonymous psychopaths who tended to be wannabes with limited skills but who were useful as infantrymen, shock troops. There was one from Cuba by way of Miami, a guy who claimed to be a torturer for Castro back in the early days before the Cuban dictator was forced to send him packing to Miami when his excesses were too egregious to ignore. That particular one was so violent, he was the one who got Dietrich to switch from one inch to three inch-thick glass when he actually cracked the first one. Moreso than anyone else, the bastard could draw, collect and expel more foot pounds of energy than anyone else in the Hole. While civilian ghost hunters are impressed with watching a child’s ball slightly rock back and forth, the torturer, nicknamed Dente Rojo or “Red Tooth” by fearful Cubans, once knocked two teeth out of a test subject’s head. It took him quite a while to recover, usually an hour or two, but if he knew where to strike in his one shot, it could easily prove fatal.

Now in his makeshift office in his makeshift warehouse, Dietrich opened a countersurveillance file on his second-hand metal desk and read the contents once again. The name of his pursuer had stuck out and after a little bit of research, Dietrich discovered that she was the granddaughter of the old fart who’d given him the technology that he was still using to this day!

It wasn’t so much the American agent whose intelligence agency had been investigating him and his activities for the past 25 months that intrigued him so much as her younger brother, someone who’d been hospitalized at around the same time as her agency began shadowing him.

This Adam Moss, aged 17, was treated for paranoid delusions. The little kike claimed to be a magnet for ghosts, an ability that Dietrich, who had to rely on heavy, cumbersome, expensive machinery, had no choice but to admire and envy. Covet, even.

Another thing that sucks about being a magnet for ghosts- You can forget about your privacy. They’re there when you’re taking a whiz or a shit and forget about jerking off, which is my only damned sex life. Not that I’ve felt like it since Clarissa… since she left me. But I could feel the pressure start to build up. Sure, I’m busted up inside but I’m still a 17 year-old kid and still alive. I felt self-conscious about even shaking my dick after I peed. Come to think of it, maybe pulling my pud would help weed out some of the Victorian or uptight Republican assholes who every night came looking for favors like I was the Godfather on his daughter’s wedding day. Nah. Then I’d probably attract dead pervs, knowing my shitty luck.

Plus, my sister’s old room is next to mine and the walls in this house not only have ears, they have parabolic antennas. I was the most unfortunate kind of kid: One whose parents have an insanely active sex life. It’s no secret that I got my sex drive from both my folks and even though their room is all the way at the end of the hall, they’re both what you’d call loud and verbal in their throes of passion, which is about six nights a week. They cut me a break after I came home from the hospital both times but I guess Mom and Dad felt the pressure building up, too. And my Jewish mother wonders why I’m so thin. It’s not so much her crappy cooking or my adolescent metabolism: It’s the fact that their sex life is ruining my appetite.

All the same, I found myself seeking the company of people that I knew were alive and kicking, even my oversexed parents. That’s especially true of my sister. Since Laura and I became young adults, we kept the fighting to a bare minimum and I even began thinking she was cool, after all. I had no idea how long she’d be home but I found myself dreading the day she’d finally pack up and leave again for Katmandu or whatever Godforsaken place her boss would send her.

I bugged her for more info on this Blood character but for some reason, she wasn’t very generous in the detail department. I think the biggest reason why I stalled about meeting him wasn’t so much that I was scared of him (although I was) as my knowing that Laura wouldn’t move out until I saw him. Yeah, I love my big sister. Fucking sue me.

When I called Laura Moss to give her some startling autopsy results, she gave me some startling news of her own: Her poor kid brother Adam had been readmitted to the hospital, this time to the nut house. I had to restrain myself from visiting him. One, I didn’t want to interrupt his therapy, however useless I was convinced it would be; Two, I didn’t want to remind him any more of his dead girlfriend than I already did and, Three, I didn’t want to come off looking like I was grilling him for more info. Which of course, I would’ve, albeit delicately.

My heart went out to the poor kid, especially after I found out from Laura that he was being visited by so many ghosts it eventually landed him back in the Napoleon Finishing School. I couldn’t help but wonder- Even though the boy was trying his best to screen out as many of those ghosts as possible, how many of them were victims of the mass suicide at the Sheraton and were trying to tell him what exactly happened?

Luckily, we get our information from the living, such as the strangely morbid but competent folks at the Essex County Coroner’s Office. Like I told Laura Moss, the traumatic deceleration of some of the street level victims temporarily masked puncture wounds. They were holes made in the body that didn’t yield any forensic evidence of a weapon. For instance, a person pierced with a sword or knife would offer some residue, according to Locard’s Exchange Principle. There would be some microscopic flakes of metal in the wound and wound channel.

Not this time, apparently. It was as if they were pierced with a ghostly weapon or a very, very sharp icicle. I began wondering if some of them were stabbed and pushed out the window after being chased all around the next-to-top story. Christ, what a way to go. To add insult to injury to our powers of ratiocination, free histamine and other tests conclusively proved that the wounds were made perimortem, or at the point of death. This was shaping up to be a classic case of knowing less and less as more and more information came in.

I quietly decided it may be a good idea to pay Adam another visit soon, after all, especially since Laura said he was discharged and came back home.

I feel pretty confident when I say that I’m probably the only dude in human history that got his cherry popped by a ghost.

Now, what I’m about to say will sound like something written for Penthouse’s letters to the editor but I have no reason to lie to you. This is how I lost my virginity to Clarissa a week or so after she passed away.

I just got out of the shower last night and my room was empty. A week ago, that wouldn’t have been unusual but since I came back from the hospital the first time, my bedroom’s been like Grand Central fucking Station for every ghost on the planet. Last night was different and, while I welcomed getting my space back, I was also wondering what was going on. Maybe they found some other medium, a real one, who would be more accommodating and didn’t mind having their privacy ripped off.

I took advantage of the rare chance to get undressed without being gawked at by dead people and took off the dirty clothes that I pulled back on when I first got out of the shower. So I was standing naked in front of my dresser pulling out a pair of flannel pajama bottoms when I saw Clarissa in the mirror.

Yeah, just like in about a hundred horror movies. Sometimes it happens for real. I whipped around and she was gone. My heart sank down to my knees. Maybe I was crazy, after all. I couldn’t believe that Clarissa would pop in for the first time since I came out of my coma just to disappear. Or maybe she couldn’t control it. Maybe she was still getting the hang of manifesting. So I called out her name. Nothing. Nada. So I called out to her again and this time she began materializing to my left.

First I saw the outline of her head and one of her shoulders. Then I could make out the perfect ponytail she wore on our last night together. Pretty soon, she was full bodied and was even beginning to show some color. She almost looked real. Too real. Her wounds were coming out, too, and I reached out and touched them.

Hugging her was like hugging a solid draft but I didn’t care. I began crying and even though I could feel her body, even her clothes, my tears dropped through her shoulder and landed on the floor.

“Where were you?” I asked. “God, I can’t tell you how much I missed you, baby.”

She smiled in response and looked like she wanted to say something back but didn’t think it was worth trying. I didn’t mind continuing the conversation for both of us. I figured, the longer I talked to her, maybe the longer she’d stay.

“Just when you were alive, when you were the only girl I wanted to hang with, you’re the only ghost I want to see.” It sounded great in my head but came out sounding like dog shit when it came out of my mouth but her sweet smile showed that she knew what I meant. She put her lips over mine, even inserting her tongue into my mouth. It was almost like sucking on an ice cube but I still didn’t care. A cold Clarissa was still a damned sight better than the hottest ghost, if there’s any such thing. Her clothes melted away from her and she, too, was naked. It was, obviously, the first time I’d ever seen her bod and even as a ghost, she was still smoking hot. I couldn’t believe I was getting hard as a rock over a dead girl.

I touched her wounds again and noticed that she’d somehow fixed her neck. So I asked her, “Think you can do something about these?” She frowned for a minute and put some effort into it and it somewhat worked. Her injuries began to fade in and out like her concentration wasn’t quite there.

Then she did something I never thought possible. She took my penis, spread her thighs and took me inside of her. Since she was almost my height, we didn’t have any problem doing it standing up. I had no idea what a vagina felt like, of course, but somehow I didn’t imagine that it would’ve felt the way it did. It was like making love with silk or satin. It felt cool and slick to my penis instead of warm and wet. I whispered into her ear, “I always wanted to tell you I love you but I was afraid. I was afraid you’d tell me you didn’t want to fuck up our friendship.” She hugged me tighter with one arm and pulled me deeper inside of her by grabbing my ass with her other arm.

It suddenly occurred to me that maybe she was able to tell the other ghosts to beat it for the night, that we had some important business to attend to.

“Did you tell the others to stop coming around and bothering me?” She smiled and nodded her head. “You can communicate with them, too?” She smiled and nodded again. Her ponytail moved as if in slow motion.

I smoothed her cornsilk-soft hair, gently grabbing her ponytail as my thrusts got faster and faster. I kissed her cool lips as I came and I saw the most amazing fucking thing- She was starting to turn transparent again and my spunk was hanging in midair where her vagina would be. I grabbed her shoulders and begged her to stay and finally she disappeared. My big blob of semen suddenly lost its shape, dropped and landed wetly on the hardwood floor. If I didn’t already start crying over losing her again, I would’ve wondered like I did later if I was still technically a virgin.

But I just stood there looking at my wad on the floor, crying like a fucking idiot. If this is what it’s like being alive, I thought, then being dead for all eternity with Clarissa was looking a fuck of a lot better than the alternative.

After I cleaned up, I pulled my pajama bottom on and looked at my clock. It was five minutes after midnight. It was officially my 18th birthday. Clarissa remembered.

The Bone Bridge- Chapter 10

2009-04-29T06:18:00.000-07:00

Am I dead?
Adam, help me.
Please contact my wife and tell her not to worry.
The police have it wrong. I was murdered.
Please help us.
I need you to reach my daughter Amelia.
Tell them to call off the search.

At some point, I can’t even tune them out with both pillows over my head. The voices keep coming and the room gets like a fucking freezer and I’m already up to three blankets and a top sheet even with the heat cranked up to 70. Don’t believe what you see on TV or in the movies. They will come out in the day time. It’s just worse at night.

The ones who probably scare the shit out of me the most are the ones who know my name and call out to me. “Adam, help me.” “Adam, please contact my family and tell them what really happened to me.” “Adam, do this, Adam, do that.” I was really beginning to resent them and when they won’t let you sleep any more, your empathy can only stretch so far.

“Shut the fuck up!” I finally screamed. “Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone!”

As usual, Mom, Dad and Laura came into my room and turned the light on and they saw me sitting up, rocking back and forth in bed, trying to tune out the voices and not succeeding. Most of them left when the lights went on, some of them stayed behind but most of them shut up like I told them to. It was obvious to my family that I needed help. My parents were thinking either the hospital or the synagogue. Laura was thinking of this Oliver Blood character. I didn’t know who to turn to, who I could trust. I just needed to make the voices stop. They all sat on my bed and Dad asked me, “Son, do you want to go to the hospital?” I didn’t see how that could do me any good. The fucking assholes follow me everywhere I go. I’d be back in the same situation only next time I wake up screaming, I’d get a shot. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. I unclenched my fist and saw that my palm was bleeding. I looked up at my Dad and nodded my head. Laura actually looked disappointed in me.

After sitting at Newton Wellesley’s triage waiting room for three hours while my Dad and I watched stupid infomercials for exercise machines and juicers, I was finally admitted to the Psych ward. I never stopped to consider that going back there would be a trip down memory lane. I immediately started thinking about all the memories I had of Clarissa and me being here two years ago. We were both here for roughly a month and just about every fuckin’ square inch of that place reminded me of her. The far corner of the activities room is where we hugged for the first time. The area front and center under the TV high above the floor is where we snuggled for the first time before they broke us up and told us not to get too intimate. The kitchen is where we first met when we were both poking around looking for chocolate milk, the first thing we discovered we had in common.

I was moved into a different room than either of us had before and there was a fat dude already sacked out. He snored so loud my bed almost vibrated but anything would be better than what kept me up all night at home. After the nursing staff situated me, Dad hugged me and quietly said everybody would be back the next day. Hopefully, he added, I’ll get to talk to the resident psychiatrist tomorrow. I think I was asleep before Dad was buzzed off the ward.

The Psychiatric Wing, Newton Wellesley Hospital, Nov. 10th

Dr. Rubin looked at me and waited for me to start and I did the same thing with her. I automatically knew from my last experience with these professional people that they automatically blew off anything I could tell them. They only deal in what they can actually analyze, what they were trained to categorize, compartmentalize, whatever the fuck they do. If you say you saw a ghost, they label you as delusional. If you say you’re someone else, it never occurs to them that you could be and they label you a schizoid.

Finally, Dr. Ellen Rubin, MD had had it up to the ceiling with my silence.

“So, Adam, according to your history, you see ghosts? Could you tell me about them?” You mean like how many were there right now? Just a few but rush hour wouldn’t be for another few hours. Instead, I said nothing. I was really beginning to regret letting my Dad drive me here. At least when I yelled at them at home to shut up, most of them did. This shrink wouldn’t be able to do dick for me and all she’d say was that I was resisting therapy or some happy horseshit. I wished I was back at the skateboard park on John LeRoy Drive with my friends. Hell, I even missed school. Although, those places, too had a bunch of memories waiting for me.

“You don’t trust me, don’t you? Well, that’s understandable. I’ve never had you for a patient. The last psychiatrist who was assigned to your case…”

“…didn’t do shit for me,” I said while giving her the stink eye. I realized she was just trying to do her job and to help me out but I suddenly felt very hostile toward her, the Psych ward and the whole Goddamned hospital. There wasn’t a single person there who could help me unless she or someone in the pharmacy had a fucking pill that drove ghosts away. But short of being put back into another coma, there was no other way that I knew of to deal with this ghost infestation.

I looked at the heavyset guy in the bathrobe near the window, the one who was snoring in my room last night and wondered if he was real. Sometimes, for brief periods of time, they can appear as real as you or me then they would just walk through a wall or simply dissolve. Dr. Rubin followed my line of vision and looked back to the window.

“What do you see, Adam?”

“What do you see?” She looked behind her again.

“I see a window.”

“Just a window?”

“Yes. What do you see?”

Well, that answered that question. Finally, the fat dude walked away from the window and through the bathroom door, not the doorway, the door itself, and never came back out.

“Just a window,” I finally answered.

Nov. 11th

Not all the ones I see are there to haunt me and ask me for favors. There are some that my sister once called “residual hauntings” or when the ghosts do the same shit over and over again and don’t even know you’re there. The fat dude in the bathrobe is one of them. My guess is he died there and didn’t know enough to move on so he just kept retracing his steps without anything changing. I know what that feels like, to get into a rut and feeling like there’s no way out. They’re the ones that don’t bother you and can never touch you because they don’t know you’re even there or even that there are other ghosts nearby. Sometimes I can hear them, sometimes I can’t. But they tend to be the most interesting ones to watch because sometimes they’ll relive their last moments on earth and I’m the only one who can see it ‘cuz for some fucked up reason I’m on their frequency.

“So, have you seen any… residual hauntings since you’ve been here, Adam?”

“Sure, Doc. There’s the fat guy in the bathrobe. He sleeps in my room and he snores so loud it’s like Cape Canaveral in there. He does the same thing every morning. He gets up, goes to that window then walks through the bathroom door and never comes out.”

Dr. Rubin looked at me with a curious expression like I just did an awesome magic trick and she wanted to ask how I did it. She turned around and looked right at him as he stood in front of the same window just like yesterday, obviously not seeing him.

“Is he there now?” I nodded. “Can you describe him?”

“He’s a big dude, over six feet. He must weigh about 250. I can’t tell how old he is. He’s an older guy, about 25 to 30, I’d guess. Brown hair, always mussed up. He’s wearin’ a white bathrobe with blue trim and it’s always open at the chest. The same time as yesterday, he went right to that window, stood there for about a half hour then walked right through the door. That’s the last I saw him until last night when he suddenly started snoring in bed.”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear Dr. Rubin knew who I was talking about. If that was the case, maybe she blew it off, assuming that I found out about this fat dude through the basket case grapevine.

Turns out later on, through one of the oldtimers on the wing, someone who’d been there since September, I found out I was talking about someone who was actually there until about a month ago. His name was Charles Bruley and was last seen looking out the same window for about a half hour then walked into the bathroom, took off the belt around his bathrobe and found a way to hang himself. He was one of Dr. Rubin’s patients.

Nov. 12th

“I’ll assume that you knew about Mr. Bruley through the news. As you can expect, it was a big, hairy deal here at the hospital. His family threatened to sue and… Bottom line, Adam, I’d rather you not talk about one of my former patients and incorporating him into your…”

“…delusions? That’s what you were gonna say, right? ‘Don’t use one of my patients in your delusional structure’? Fine, I won’t talk about him again. I thought you were here to help me, though.”

“I am, Adam. But talking about one of my patients is not…”

“Hey, you were the one who asked me what I saw and to describe him. Now you’re tweakin’ out on me when I did. What the fuck do you want from me, Doc?”

“Alright, that was a mistake on my part and I’m sorry.” She looked down at her notes about me that I did and didn’t want to read. “What do you see right now?”

“I see Bruley standing at the window again. He’s gonna go hang himself in a few minutes. You can set your fuckin’ watch by him.”

“Who or what else do you see that the rest of us can’t?”

Bruley started shuffling off into the bathroom and walked right through the door. “Hold on, I’ll be right back.” I followed him in. A few minutes later I came back out. I was shaking like I just chugged a pot of coffee but I had to do it. I’d never seen anything like that before but I was getting sick and tired of Dr. Rubin and others telling me I was crazy.

“His suicide note was tucked in the waistline of his boxer shorts and read, ‘I’m sorry, Dr. Rubin. Don’t blame yourself. I hope you don’t get in trouble over this. Tell my family I love them. Charles.’ He misspelled your name and spelled it with an ‘e’.”

Dr. Rubin looked at me like I was sprouting lilies out of my ears. Bruley’s suicide note wasn’t published in the press and none of the other patients were allowed in the bathroom for hours after they found his body.

Nov. 13th

Whatever homing beacon I have in me started working again because as Dr. Rubin continued our therapy sessions, the wing got more and more crowded. In addition to Charles Bruley in between his suicides there were people who might and might not have been former patients. By the fourth day, there were more dead people on the ward than living. One old dude seemed to take a special interest in my shrink.

“You wanna know who else is here?”

“Who, Adam?”

“Your grandfather. He says his name is Oscar.”

“How did…? OK, Adam, this is very inappropriate. I’d rather you not mention my family any more, so let’s just keep this…”

“Don’t you wanna know what he wants, Doc? He’s standing right behind you.”

I could tell she was dying to turn around to look although she wouldn’t have seen him. He wore regular old man clothes with his pants almost up to his navel, was bald and looked about 80, real skinny.

“Alright, tell me.”

“He says he forgives you for going to medical school instead of Julliard. He would’ve rather you played violin in some orchestra but he now knows that he was wrong for spazzing out on you for going to Harvard. He wants you to forgive him.”

Dr. Rubin stood up so fast she knocked the plastic chair on its back.

“That’s enough, Adam! I don’t know how you found out this stuff about my family but I’m getting sick and tired of you using them and my patients in your, yes, I’ll say it, delusional structure.”

I stood up, too. I’d had it with her own bullshit.

“Hey, Doc, here’s the 411: I didn’t know that your grandfather existed until just now. In fact, I didn’t even know you existed until a few days ago, so cut me some fucking slack, alright?!”

I heard the front door buzz then open and my Dad, Mom and Laura walked into the ward just in time to hear me yelling at my doctor. A couple of the nurses walked toward me and told me to chill out. I sat back down and watched Mr. Bruley go hang himself in the bathroom as usual before I started crying my eyes out. The only ghost I wanted to see was the only one in the spirit world, it seemed, who never showed up anymore. Where was Clarissa? God, I missed her.

Laura and my folks talked to the doctor but mostly Laura. I was discharged a little over an hour later.

The Bone Bridge- Chapter 9

2009-04-29T06:12:00.000-07:00

Washington, DC, November 9th

“That much of a temperature variance, huh? Man, that’s off the charts, Elle, even in my experience,” Oliver Blood said as he paced his office. As promised, his best field agent had called him right after leaving the police station. While the news was welcome, it was far from happy. It seemed as if Dietrich was winding up and planning something big, as in Jonestown big. Blood got a queasy feeling down to his DNA that the German terrorist merely killed 53 people who were all probably in Who’s Who just as a trial run. If that was the case, where would he stop? “Alright, lemme know if you find anything else out. What?” He listened on his secure satellite phone. “Alright, bring your brother in, for whatever good it’ll do. Well, not here, obviously. A neutral spot but nothing too public. Alright, bye.”

Oliver Blood stopped pacing as soon as he terminated the connection and folded his long, lean frame into his leather swivel chair. What Agent Moss said about the autopsy photos and results almost made him glad it was she and not he who had to look at them. Some of them, according to her, died with their faces frozen in expressions of horror.

The agency knew through the Xe (formerly Blackwater) security detail that was also working surveillance that that Stasi prick was in Baghdad just a couple of weeks ago to help rid the Iraqi government, if it could be yet termed an actual government, of a certain belligerent entity named Mursi al Islamiyah. The word was that the now-infamous Charles Graner was the guy who offed him but since al Islamiyah was a proven terrorist and associate of Osama bin Laden, there was no dustup over the accidental death. In fact, when Graner was brought up on charges under the UCMJ, neither al Islamiyah’s name or death was even mentioned in the indictments. No doubt, the Bush administration that was so tough on terror was secretly worried about al Qaida backlash over Mursi’s death by misadventure.

Blood shuddered to think what Dietrich could do with a hundred or even just a few dozen entities as pissed off as al Islamiyah would’ve rightly been. In fact, the African American agency Director deeply suspected that he didn’t have to look any further than the aftermath of the Sheraton massacre. Yet if Dietrich came into possession of the technology that they were all but convinced he possessed, then how was he paying for it? As far as they understood it, such machinery that would have to be involved would take up enormous resources not to mention energy. And he wasn’t close to being convinced that whatever money Dietrich got from his industrial-scale “investigations” would provide him with enough to cover such overhead expenses.

Bottom line: Someone even above Dietrich was funding him but who? And to what end?

Braintree, MA, Nov. 9th

When Laura came back from where she went that morning and told me she’d set up a meeting with this Blood dude, I thought of all the times I’d been called to the principal’s office. No matter what I did, and I’d pulled some doozies in school, no trip to Mr. Croaker’s office compared to the dread I felt at that moment. She could tell I was getting freaked out and she said,

“Adam, Honey, it’s OK. Look, it’s true that almost no one gets to see my boss considering the line of work we’re in. I know it seems like something out of PG 13 rated action movie for an ordinary kid to meet an intelligence agency head but we all understand that you’re a civilian. No one’s going to be shining desk lamps in your face or anything.” She smiled to reassure me and it almost worked. Almost. If anything, I was far from ordinary. All the same, about as far out as I’m willing to go is wearing an Emo ‘do of two different colors. Other than that, I just wanted my life back, to be normal.

I was suspicious of my sister’s motives for wanting to hook me up with this dude. She kept saying that she wanted me to help them but that didn’t wash. How could I help them, an Emo boy on a skateboard who probably had hallucinations and one with a psychiatric history, at that? Helping them, my skinny Jewish ass. She was trying to protect me from something or someone that she wasn’t telling me about.

Laura’s kid brother always had a mobile, expressive face and it was obvious to her that he still didn’t trust her. That stung badly enough but what stung her even more was the fact that perhaps he shouldn’t. The nature of her business being what it is, she couldn’t tell even her own flesh and blood, at least not right away, about what the stakes could be. It was a given to her that her brother Adam was a sensitive, a bridge of flesh and bone that could make a vital connection between the worlds of the quick and the dead. And seeing, hearing and communicating with them en masse were perhaps not the extent of his undeveloped abilities. Just because their payroll was the smallest of all the government’s intelligence agencies didn’t mean they had the fewest troops.

During her training right out of college, Laura learned something fascinating: According to anthropologists and other scientists, it was estimated that something between 65 and 75 billion people had lived and died on the planet earth before the present population. Obviously, not all of them come back as paranormal entities otherwise supernatural sightings would be much more commonplace than they already are.

Yet it was estimated that at least several million of those 65-75 billion lost souls died yet were never truly laid to rest. Between war, famine, plague, pestilence and purges, the sheer number of human beings who had suddenly died before setting their house in order couldn’t even be imagined. Laura shuddered to think that most of not all of them, sensing Adam’s abilities when he was briefly dead, would come back to him appealing for resolution or salvation.

He was always a sensitive plant and she just knew deep in her bones that he wouldn’t be able to handle such a massive intrusion on his personal space. In fact, it was during such a time when Adam had his attempt two years ago. The sightings and encounters, albeit on a much smaller scale, were enough to drive him over the edge and one such noxious spirit, perhaps just for shits and giggles, told her brother he’d be better off if he opened a vein.

Laura wondered if such entities lived in one massive, common dimension or if they flitted back and forth randomly across others, including our own. Either way, one thing was for sure: Just as with the living, the dead, too, have their good and bad elements. And Laura’s agency had it on pretty good faith from which side Dietrich was recruiting. All that was required of him was to find the right one, the one that could rally, unite and organize an army unlike any ever seen before. And if Dietrich did that, then they, too, would need their own rally man.

Laura looked at her innocent kid brother as he struggled with a calculator while catching up on his math homework. She cupped his face with her hand and smiled sadly.

I so incredibly didn’t need this. Every time things start to get shitty at home, my folks briefly get all orthodox and Hasidic and bring the rabbi over. They brought him to the hospital when Clarissa and I were there a couple of years ago and it can’t be said that he did a damned bit of good. Apparently, it’s the same in a lot of households: Ordinarily secular families calling in the big guns when they run out of real answers. Catholics bring in priests who try to talk you into feeling guilty about something, Protestant ministers who try to talk you into voting Republican and neurotic rabbis who come to see if you’re properly neurotic, too. I liked Rabbi Green well enough on a personal basis but when he began talking about the Torah I’d start checking the insides of my eyelids for cracks.

“Honey, you’re going through a tough time with these things you’re imagining and Rabbi Green here…”

“I’m not imagining things! They’re there, Mom.”

“OK, whatever, Honey,” she said. I hated it when she patronized me. Every time she does that I feel like hopping on my skateboard and coasting all the way to Venice Beach. “Rabbi Green here just wants to talk to you and maybe help you through this.”

I looked at our family’s rabbi, who at least had the courtesy to wear his civilian clothes instead of going all Men in Black. As far as rabbis went, I guess he was pretty cool. He didn’t have the heavy beard that a lot of Hasidic rabbis do and was secular enough so that he could rap with people on an earthly level. Laura seemed amused by the whole thing as she leaned against the doorway. I wanted to make a face at her just for old time’s sake.

“OK, Rabbi, let’s go in the kitchen,” I said as I slouched down the hall.

“So, what you’re saying, Adam, is that you’re seeing dead people again.” He said it as a statement rather than a question. Using the phrase “seeing dead people” could’ve made it sound like he was ridiculing me but I could tell he wasn’t.

“Yeah, obviously. I can even see their old wounds. They tell me how they died. They tell me to contact their families. I’m not a Goddam… I’m not a medium. I really don’t need this.”

“Do you see any of them now?” He asked as if he was afraid to hear the answer. He should’ve been. We were fucking surrounded. I was learning to tune them out somewhat. It was their voices that distracted me more than anything. Like I told Clarissa on our last night together, I can’t not listen. But ignoring these poor people when they come to me asking for help makes me feel wicked guilty.

“Yeah,” I simply said, nodding my head. About 15 ghosts were standing behind Rabbi Green’s chair and a couple of them were really fucked up. I didn’t even want to know how many were behind me. The one word I hear more often than not is “Help.” Up to a point, I could appreciate their situation but their selfishness was really beginning to tick me off. I was ready to take back what I said about them bringing their manners with them from the grave ‘cuz it seems the first thing people forget after they die is how to wait in line. Then again, they may do that because they’re really not aware of each other’s presence. I don’t know enough about that shit. Maybe Laura and that Blood dude could educate me.

“It’s getting rather chilly in here, isn’t it?” It was getting so cold in the kitchen that the rabbi had to zip up his windbreaker. Another few degrees and we could’ve seen our breath.

“Yeah, that happens when they show up. It especially sucks during the winter.”

“Have they given you their names?”

“Yeah. Some of them knew you were coming over. Some of them are here to see you, not me.”

“They’re here to see me, you say?” he asked pointing to himself.

“Remember old man Friedman? The old dude who ran that second hand general store in downtown?” Rabbi Green nodded. “He’s got his hand on your left shoulder right now and he’s asking you…” I listened more closely since Friedman was talking in a whisper. “I can’t make out what he’s saying but he’s trying to make contact. Some are louder than others. Wait, I hear him now.” I paused to listen. “He said he always had the hots for your wife. That’s really the only reason he went to shul in the morning. He was trying to make atonements because he was guilty about wanting to bone your wife.”

Rabbi Green touched his left shoulder with his right hand and looked at it. He must’ve felt the cold spot that Mr. Friedman left behind. Actually, a lot of guys in the synagogue have the hots for Bertha Green, including my old man, mainly ‘cuz she had probably the biggest tits in Braintree. He was looking more and more freaked out by the second and I looked at him as if to say, “Welcome to my world, bitch.”

“Have they…? OK, Adam, listen closely and tell me the truth. Have they told you which one is… the true religion?” I looked at Rabbi Green for a long time before answering him.

“I don’t know what you’d call it, Rabbi, but let’s just say you all got it wrong.”

Rabbi Green never said another word to me and he beat it the hell out of there without even so much as a “Shalom.” And this time I don’t think it was because of Mom’s horrible gefilte fish.

The Bone Bridge- Chapter Eight

2009-04-28T14:43:00.000-07:00

CIA HQ, Langley, VA, March 28, 1968
“Now, who’s this bird, again?” asked President Johnson of the CIA Assistant Director in his trademark drawl. They were impatient to start the presentation and the Commander in Chief kept interrupting them with questions that they knew would be answered by the film. But patience was never one of LBJ’s long suits. Understandably, he was flabbergasted when apprised in the Oval Office of the research being done at MIT and underwritten by the CIA.

“The gentleman narrating the film is Dr. Bernard Moss, Mr. President. He’s the project manager of Operation Casper,” the AD patiently explained. “Now, if you’re ready, sir, let’s just watch the film and see what Dr. Moss has to say.”

A lot depended on this film and the President was understandably skeptical about the research findings. There were only six men in the room, which was already about half of the people on earth who knew of the work being done in a top secret laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts. The idea was to convince LBJ to declassify the findings and privately ask Congressional leaders of both parties and pertinent committee chairmen to allocate more money into the CIA’s budget to in turn increase funding for Casper.

“Alright,” the President said, “let ‘er rip.” The room went dark and the projector began to whirr.

“Operation Casper: A Proposal,” began Dr. Moss. The 36th President had to stifle a giggle on hearing a super serious mad scientist type refer with a straight face to a million dollar Central Intelligence Agency program named after a cute cartoon ghost.

Even without anything to use for scale, the narrator seemed a small man made even smaller by his oversized white lab coat and, in fact, he was. His eyes were large and green, eyes made even larger by the thick lenses of his glasses. His full head of white hair was unruly and he himself looked like a cartoon stereotype of a mad scientist, albeit a benevolent one.

The presentation film showed all the flair and panache of modern federal architecture and publications from the government printing office. As with seemingly all training and orientation films of the day, it was desk- or stage-bound on account of the one static camera and the cutaways were animated, which also almost made the Commander in Chief chuckle out loud. The Assistant Director, who also hadn’t seen the film, pinched the bridge of his nose as he saw LBJ’s silhouetted head bob up and down, obviously in amusement. But it was a foregone conclusion that unless Moss literally pulled a ghost out of his ass or Fellini was hired to direct the second half, the President’s transient amusement wouldn’t exactly translate into extra funding. Hell, he might even advise the Congressional leaders to cut funding altogether. As it was, the whole thing looked so much like Saturday morning cartoon fare, he was actually surprised they didn’t draw the animated ghosts with sheets or even use Casper in a cameo.

“…and if our research findings are correct,” Dr. Moss concluded, “we may one day actually be able to trap these entities in a manmade dimension, sort of a vortex, if you will. Once detained and fixed, we can then learn from these beings and perhaps be able to harness their abilities in the world of the living to be applied in the realm of national security. Thank you for listening.”

Presently, the lights came back on and the President was grinning as if he’d been getting a blow job under the desk the whole time.

“Well!” he exclaimed. “That’s certainly a Texas league whopper! Maybe JFK’s kids woulda got something out of that, too!” Then he added in a more ominous tone, “in 1963! What the hell was that, Mr. Assistant Director? You actually thought that was worth taking up half my morning?”

“Mr. President,” the AD stammered, no longer secure even in his continued employment in the Company, much less the additional funding, “I agree that the presentation may have been a little condescending, but…”

“‘May have been a little condescending’? Mr. Director, I can think of some retards down in Oklahoma that woulda laughed at that! And you expect me to ask Congressional leaders, including Republicans, for more money based on that?”

“Sir, the research findings are conclusive up to a point. You can’t deny they made some headway in terms of…”

“I’ve already heard enough,” the President said as he got up to leave the secure conference room. “Ya’ll get to keep your present funding for your cartoon schemes but there ain’t no way I’m gonna fund Vietnam, the War on Poverty plus more for that…” and he gestured vaguely toward the projection screen, “that… lunacy.”

“So it stayed in limbo until it got axed right after Nixon left office,” Laura said. This time it was Adam’s turn to drop his jaw in his lap. He knew that Grandpa Bernard was a research scientist but Mom and Dad never discussed his work, especially after he was found washed up on the banks of the Charles with his untracked veins bulging with high-grade heroin. “Intelligence scuttlebutt has it LBJ was still chuckling about our grandfather’s film on his deathbed five years later.”

“So… so what you’re sayin’ is, you continued Grandpa’s work?”

“Uh, no. Not exactly. The agency’s working along parallel lines but, no, we’re not continuing Grandpa’s work.” Laura stopped to look at her brother. “Our job, among other things, is to keep others from doing that.”

“So you’re like, a real-life Agent Scully.” Laura pinched the bridge of her nose.

“No, Adam, not like Agent Scully and the X Files. There’s a lot of research that goes into the work, a lot of leads that lead to dead ends. No aliens, no Sasquatch, no secret flying saucers at Area 51, none of that. There’s really not a lot I can say about my job that would interest you.” Frighten, perhaps, but not what one would call strictly interest. She didn’t see any reason to bring Adam completely into the fold. That would depend upon Oliver, the agency’s boss.

The mass suicide at the Boston Sheraton was news in which she and the agency had more than a passing interest. As with the baffled Boston PD, Oliver Blood and the relatively few people under him knew that this wasn’t explainable by mass psychosis. Although there was little to no forensic evidence from which to launch even a plausible theory, a paranormal angle would explain the obvious terror that had gripped these people in their final moments. Two of the 53 victims were the parents of a girl with whom her sibling had almost died in a car accident.

If Adam was somehow connected to the possible supernatural shenanigans in Boston, she had yet to see it. Yet Adam’s seeming involvement couldn’t be ignored and left to chance, especially in light of his “glimpses.” Then there was his claiming that Clarissa’s alleged ghost pled with him to “Free us.” Lastly, from what her brother himself had just told her, a certain police detective named Ed Coffey was also thinking along the same lines as she. She’d have to talk to this cop, pick his brains to see what they found out in their own investigation, if anything. Yeah, she’d have to bring her baby brother in from the cold, albeit slowly.

“Adam, while I’m still in town,” she calmly said, “I’d like you to meet my boss.”

I don’t think I’ll ever look at my big sister quite the same way ever again. I mean, I always thought that how she made her living was kinda sketchy even before I knew that she was a spook, if you’ll pardon the phrase. Just the fact that she worked for the government was both cool and scary at the same time. But this shit she just unloaded on me…

I also wasn’t exactly sketched out to meet her boss. Any intelligence agency head honcho is a scary dude in my opinion and just the fact that most of our government not knowing about their existence was enough for me to dig in my heels. Laura tried reassuring me that this Blood dude (Day-am, even his name scared me shitless) was righteous but I wasn’t about to go forming on blind faith warm and fuzzy opinions about a guy who’s probably waxed more people than Ted Bundy.

I wondered how long it would take for Bundy’s unknown victims to seek me out asking me to solve their murders and if Laura and this Blood dude could help me out with that.

Boston, MA, November 9
“Coffey! There’s some girl out here to see you.” I nodded and put the Sheraton file away. I asked Roddy which one it was and he said, “The cute blonde over there,” pointing in her direction.

She was of medium height and slightly voluptuous build, shoulder length blonde hair neatly pulled back with a barrette. Despite the November chill, she wore a simple white blouse under a black dress coat and matching slacks. She advanced toward me, extending her hand. As I got closer to her, I noticed the bulge beneath her coat just under her visitor badge and wondered if the lifer manning the metal detector downstairs fell asleep or was too busy gawking at her big tits. No way was she supposed to have that piece up here.

“Detective Coffey?” I nodded and took her hand. “I’m Laura Moss. Could I have a few minutes of your time? In private?”

We walked into one of the unused interrogation rooms and each took a seat. I waited for her to continue and she got right down to business.

“Detective, we’d like to know the status of your investigation into the Sheraton mass suicide on Halloween night.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” In response, she showed me her credentials and it seemed as if she was sent here from our mutual Uncle Sam. When I looked at her name on the intelligence agency badge, it finally clicked. Sure, Moss was a common name but it was a bit of a stretch to think it could be pure coincidence meeting another within a few days.

“I just met another Moss. Some kid named Adam.”

“I know. He’s my brother. I got your name from him.”

I sat back and regarded her with new eyes. If her brother was her sole reason for picking my brains about this case, then perhaps she wasn’t here in an official capacity, after all, and had no business using the word “we”. Besides, why would the feds be sniffing around asking about an investigation that, as far I was concerned, was still a municipal matter? If anything, it would be the FBI trying to walk on our grass instead of this intelligence agency I’d never heard of. I felt I was on solid ground in assuming I didn’t have to tell her a damned thing but I still wanted to see what exactly she wanted and, more importantly, why she wanted to know it.

“How’s your brother doing, by the way?”

“He’s doing fine,” Moss finally said as she exhaled, which told me he wasn’t. “I just got back home early last night and we talked. He still hasn’t gone back to school but he’s getting his homework sent to him and he seems to be getting back to his old self.” Then for the briefest of instants she smirked as if remembering an inside joke.

“Has he remembered anything else that happened that night?” She shook her head.

“I don’t know what he’d told you at the hospital but he didn’t give me any indication that he recalled anything else of significance.”

“So, may I ask what interest your agency has in this case? Or do they even know you’re here? I’m suspecting this may be a purely family matter.”

“Well, yes and no, Detective. My people have taken a very lively interest in the case and my brother’s involvement, while undetermined, is still undeniable. I mean, you have to admit it would be a hell of a string of coincidences for him to not be relevant to it in some way.”

I looked her up and down and remembered the gun under her jacket. Her creds would certainly explain why the people downstairs would let her through the metal detector. She seemed to be tough as nails and her kid brother’s involvement would perhaps make her even tougher to deal with.

When I was in the Green Berets, I’d run across a few spooks from the CIA when they were all duded out in their camo fatigues. Some of them thought they were as badass as us and a few of them were. This very feminine young lady didn’t strike me as being a wannabe. The impression I got was that she could field strip an AK47 in pitch blackness with her feet while applying her makeup.

“OK, you realize this is a very high profile investigation considering the identity of the victims.” She nodded with barely hidden impatience. “I can’t just release details and evidence from an ongoing investigation merely because your brother is, at best, marginally involved with some of the principals. I don’t care who you work for, Agent Moss.”

“How about if I can help you establish MO and maybe provide you with a suspect?”

I leaned back in the chair again and tapped the long bare table as I regarded her with another set of eyes. This girl was beginning to spook me more than the case itself.

“You guys were here long before us, weren’t you?” I quietly asked. She nodded.

“Months and months of studying criminal justice, fingerprinting, crime scene investigation and criminal psychology and how do I use it? Getting your coffee.” The patrolman put the Dunkin’ Donuts bag and cup holder down on the interrogation room table.

“Look at it this way, Ramirez: As long as Roddy keeps making that hemlock he calls coffee, you’ll be fulfilling a cherished cop stereotype.” The Hispanic officer humorlessly smirked at me and left Laura Moss and me alone.

This girl certainly wasn’t a stereotype. The intelligence types I saw in the Army, including Army Intelligence, were almost all macho assholes who probably took a shot of testosterone in their coffee in the morning and stirred it in with a survival knife. Moss, my instincts told me, was as tough as any of them but wasn’t overbearing about it. She didn’t sacrifice much if any of her femininity.

“OK, you understand that nothing you see here leaves this room, right? No files leave, no copies or notes will be made. You look at what you see here and keep it in your head.” I realized even as I said that there was no way I could keep her from making notes after she left the station. Hell, knowing these James Bond types, I couldn’t even be sure she didn’t have a miniature camera built into one of her blouse’s buttons and was silently clicking away like Annie Liebovitz..
“You’re not making this easy for me, Detective.”

“If this line of work was easy, we’d all be doing it.” I opened up the bulging case file and she immediately went to the dozens of pictures of the victims. Most of them were gory beyond belief and had even made me wince when I first saw them but Laura didn’t bat an eyelash until she got to one. I spotted the extra beat she lost looking at it. “What?”

“Clarissa’s autopsy photo. Those poor kids,” she muttered as she continued reviewing the pictures.

“You know, just an observation: Your brother perfectly described her injuries down to their precise location and he couldn’t have known that since he was out cold for four days. How do you explain that?”

“Like I said, Detective, he has a gift, although he’d call it a curse. I believe that he wasn’t dreaming about her.”

I recalled the security video showed to me in the hospital and what didn’t sit right with me tickled the back of my skull again but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I was trying to zero in on what didn’t seem right when Moss looked at a picture and held it up for special attention. I asked her what it was.

“This picture of Senator Dumont’s wife. Are those ice crystals on her face?”

“Yeah. That was the only tangible evidence that we got at the crime scene and it melted away almost as soon as our CSI guy snapped the picture. Any theories as to how that ice formed?”

“Maybe,” she said cryptically. Apparently, she was playing the same cat and mouse game I was, the both of us playing proprietor. At this rate, it was going to get us nowhere and in record time.

“OK, quid pro quo. You said you could give me some insight regarding MO and a suspect. Who do you think could be behind this and why is your agency looking at him?”

“You ever heard of the East German Stasi, Detective?” I cautiously nodded my head and she told me about the illustrious life and times of one Hans Dietrich and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It got even more bizarre when she told me who her grandfather was and what he used to work on in the 60’s.

“It isn’t a theory, Ed.” We’d long since begun a first name basis. The coffee was gone and only donut crumbs and a lot of my questions remained. “When a spirit manifests, it can significantly reduce the temperature where it appears. It’s commonly referred to as a cold spot.”

“Could it get so cold as to crystallize human skin tissue?”

“Typically, no. There have been some documented cases of already chilly environments getting down to freezing. We’ve heard of temperature variances of sometimes ten, even twenty degrees, maybe more. But the kind of cold that would’ve been necessary to produce those ice crystals… Ed, there would’ve had to have been dozens of apparitions there, all drawing energy from the air simultaneously. It would’ve been like a reefer in that penthouse.” She was right. It was but at the time we tended to dismiss that because of the rush of cold air coming in from the broken windows.

“So why would Dietrich do this? I mean, does this technology you’re talking about actually exist? Because this sounds like something out of Ghost Busters.” She seemed irritated by the movie reference. No doubt she’d heard all the jokes before.

“Yes, we all but believe it does. And my grandfather’s partly the reason why. He’s also part of the reason why I got into this line of work, to help atone for his research, to ensure that it isn’t resurrected and perverted for nefarious ends. As for why Dietrich may’ve done this… That’s undetermined.”

When I first met her, I deeply suspected her involvement was purely a family matter. I just didn’t realize how deeply a family matter it was.

“OK, unless this Dietrich guy lives in Copley Plaza, I think it’s safe to say he’s out of our jurisdiction. So how do we reach this asshole?”

“Leave that up to me,” Laura grinned. She put her hand on my arm as she got up to leave and my mind suddenly flashed back to the hospital’s security video.

“Wait. Before you go, let me show you something.”

“So this is the moment my brother woke up from his coma?” I nodded and chewed a fingernail. We stood beside each other while closely regarding the monitor. I let the tape run for a few seconds then stabbed at the “pause” button. “There! Did you see that?”

“No. What did you see?” I pointed to her brother’s right arm.

“I’ll play it back. Make careful note of that arm when he begins to get up.” I slowed the speed to frame by frame and while Adam’s head and torso began rising from the bed, his arm remained pinned to the mattress. In fact, the sheet over it had also been pressed down.

“As if someone was holding it down,” she slowly said. “Nice catch, Ed.”

“Right. No one, I don’t care who, would create such a delusion immediately after waking up from a coma, especially if he doesn’t even know there’s a camera on him. That always bugged me subconsciously and then when you touched my arm back there, it all clicked. Someone or something was holding down his arm.”

“Clarissa,” Laura sighed.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter Seven

2009-04-28T14:41:00.000-07:00

The Moss home, Braintree, MA, November 8th
Laura Moss pulled up to her parents’ homestead in her rented Chevy Cobalt and concurrently breathed first a sigh of relief and inhaled with dread at what Adam might present. She had nothing but her Mom’s word to go on and it seemed every time she called her brother was either asleep or out of the house. They had to walk a fine line between sheltering him and letting him get back on the horse or skateboard as it were. They all knew that he was visiting Clarissa’s grave every day and it broke their hearts to see the poor boy pining for her. Yet they also all knew that unless Adam stopped mooning over Clarissa’s plot, someone would have to read him the riot act and tell him to stop his obsessive/compulsive behavior.

She continued texting him while she could on the plane and, as always, could never get through. At Logan Airport, she called home and Mom said he was sleeping. He hadn’t gone back to school yet and his depression was really starting to worry his family. So when Clarissa marched up the walkway she had no idea if Adam was still in bed or out. The sun was just beginning to set. Since Iraq was eight hours ahead of the eastern US, there was jet lag with which she’d have to contend but not tonight. She was too keyed-up worrying about her baby brother.

She walked right in without knocking and announced herself. Why should she? This was the house in which she and Adam grew up and for the few days she’d be here, she wouldn’t be “Elle” but Laura. Mom came out from the kitchen after a second or two, wiping her hands on a towel then broke into a full sprint. Wrapping her daughter in a hug, she began sobbing. Laura hugged her mother back and only realized it had been over a year since she’d last been in her childhood home. Still, Jewish mothers, she thought, were overly emotional when it came to their children. She’d had no choice but to adopt a stoic attitude in her line of work but Laura conceded that perhaps her Mom had a right to emotionalism since she was a Mom and Laura wasn’t.

Her fingers smelled of gefilte fish, which she always made homemade. Adam couldn’t stand it and he was always the closest thing the family had to a gentile. For Mom, matzo ball soup and gefilte fish was her comfort food like mac and cheese with hot dog pennies was always Laura’s. Come to think of it, no one else in the family liked Mom’s gefilte fish and even Rabbi Green, when he’d come over, always tightly smiled during such dinners as if he was circumcising an elephant. Mrs. Moss was probably the only wife and mother in the entire Judaic world who couldn’t cook.

“Oh my God, Laura, I was beginning to think we’d never see you again!”

“Mom, I’ve been busy, not dead.” She gently separated from her mother and looked at her. She cut her hair again, which was always a mistake with her physiognomy. With her hair short or pulled-back, her moon-shaped face always looked as big around as a hub cap.

“I like your new haircut,” she charitably said.

“Thanks. Adam’s still upstairs. I imagine you’d rather see him than me or Dad right now. We’ll have time to catch up, later.” She wiped her eyes dry and walked back into the kitchen.

I twitched when there was a knock at my door. Yeah, sometimes, they actually knock just before they haunt you. Sometimes they knock on other things. It’s like even after people die they take their manners to the grave and then bring them back when they come calling.

“Who… who is it?” I asked in a tiny voice. The blankets were already up to my fucking chin. I jumped out of bed and tore open the door when Laura answered.
I wrapped her in a huge hug and pulled her in and, believe it or not, my sister the Ice Princess was actually sobbing.

“Didn’t you get my messages? I was going crazy trying to call and text you!” she said with half anger and half love.

“I lost my phone,” I lamely explained. I never had the guts to ask if I could look for it in Clarissa’s Range Rover. I tried calling it from the house but no one ever answered it but an automated message saying the user was unavailable, yada yada. I figured maybe it got thrown out and smashed when the car tumbled.

“Oh, kiddo, I’m so sorry about Clarissa!” She hugged me again.

At the mention of her name, tears I thought were long cried out started pouring down my face and suddenly we weren’t secret agent and Emo boy but just two siblings who just hadn’t seen each other in way too long. I gladly hugged her back and tried my damnedest to ignore the pale man in the far corner of my room.

Laura couldn’t understand why Adam kept glancing at a corner of his room as if self-consciously mindful of another person observing their private moment. Mom had told him that Adam claimed to have seen Clarissa at the hospital days after she was killed and both she and Dad had dismissed it as either a dream or as one of Adam’s “glimpses.” The way he’d once explained it to her when they were still growing up, he said seeing a ghost was like getting a glimpse into another environment, like you would catch a fleeting glimpse of the interior of a passenger train as it sped by. Their baby brother who’d died seven years ago was just the first one he’d claim to see but certainly not the last.

Finally, when Adam opened up his wrists two years ago (Thank God he made the same mistake as many others, cutting horizontally instead of vertically), Adam said a ghost had told him to do it. They feared that he was schizophrenic until the psychiatrist at the hospital had the chance to examine him and rule out that diagnosis. The doctor said that Adam was suffering from paranoid delusions but certainly not schizophrenia, which was a much rarer malady. Then he met Clarissa and the two of them seemed to thrive and even depend upon each other. They both made a mutually miraculous recovery and Adam was discharged two days after her. They’d been almost inseparable ever since. When Laura got word that Clarissa was killed while Adam was with her, she feared her death would make her brother relapse.

But she had no illusions about his paranoid delusions. Adam was legitimately seeing things. And she feared he was seeing something right now, something that he was desperately trying to ignore and not call attention to.

I really wished that dude had stopped looking at me, at us. The fucking assholes (Clarissa excepted) hardly gave me a breather since. The kid in The Sixth Sense used to piss me off in that he never seemed to be seriously freaked out about seeing dead people. Trust me, kids, that’s some shit you just never take in your stride. The ones that died in horrible accidents were usually the worst ones because they come back with their trauma intact. One thing I noticed during the one time I made contact with Clarissa was she seemed to be holding her head at an odd angle. So when that cop told me that she died of a broken neck, I put two and two together.

The dude in the corner was one of those guys, I guess. He had a humongous chest wound like someone tattooed him with a fucking shotgun or something. What creeped me out was that he kept making like he was reaching out to me but couldn’t move or talk. He just stood there, his left arm out, like the world’s most hideous panhandler.

“What are you looking at, Bro?” Laura looked at the corner where he was standing quietly spazzing out but of course she couldn’t see him. Seeing shit like that was, for some reason, my job.

“Nuthin’. So, how ya doin’, Sis? Working on anything interesting?”

“You know I can’t talk about that,” she said. I knew that’s what her answer would be. It always is. But I was so distracted by the dude in the corner that I didn’t know what else to say. When I looked back to where he was, he was gone. I breathed a small sigh of relief.

“I’m sorry if I freaked you out. I guess, since you were in Baghdad, you were there doing something important.”

“Adam,” she said. As she drew out the last syllable of my name, she almost sounded like she was whining. She hugged me again, “stop apologizing, Honey. It’s not like you were driving the car or anything.”

“No, Clarissa was.” And I was no closer to understanding why she did what she did than I was the moment I woke up from my coma.

“Do you remember…?” She stopped and re-gathered her thoughts. “Do you recall anything during your near-death experience?”

Mom and Dad and even one of my friends asked me the same thing and I was getting sick and tired of being treated like a freak. There’s being treated like a freak because of my Emo boy looks but this was something else entirely.

“Yeah,” I said in all seriousness. “There was this pinprick of light. Then it got bigger and bigger and I started to see shit on the other side. It was like, swimming in pure light. Then as this bright white light got bigger and bigger, I heard music and saw…” Laura’s eyes also got bigger and I knew I’d hooked her. “…I saw… Elvis sitting on a Laz-E-Boy with this big-ass remote, controlling the world.”

Laura slapped my shoulder, knowing that I got her for a change.

“You wouldn’t believe how loud Elvis’s farts are, Laura.” She slapped the same shoulder again.

“You fucking asshole. You really had me goin’ there. Just for that, I’m telling all your Emo friends you’re a Phil Collins and Genesis fan.” She laughed and pulled a strand of hair behind her ear and asked, “So you don’t remember anything, then?”

“Nah. I mean, I didn’t even know until after I got back and even then I overheard Mom telling one of her friends from the synagogue.”

“They didn’t even tell you you were clinically dead?”

“Fuck no. You know, because of my… history,” I said with exaggerated scare quotes. Despite the fact that while growing up we fought like rabid cats and dogs, Laura always gave me the impression that she was on my side. We drew closer together after our brother died because we knew Mom wouldn’t have any more after us. So, as far as siblings went, we knew we were all we had and were ever going to have.

“Laura,” I said while chewing my lower lip, “I have a confession to make.” She looked at me more closely. “They’re back, only there’re more of them. A lot more.”

When Adam got done talking, my jaw was almost touching my knees. He’d told me the stories of the ghosts he was seeing back when but it seemed as if, when he came back from the dead, he didn’t come back alone. What truly alarmed me was when Adam said they were coming in ever greater numbers. I believed him to the point that I was convinced they were coming to him for some reason. I wanted to protect my baby brother since I couldn’t or didn’t take it on faith they were all good but how the hell do you protect a loved one from insubstantial energy?

“OK, baby brother, since we’re making confessions like guilty Catholics, I got one for you. And you have to promise to not put it on your Myspace or Facebook pages, ya hear?”

“Waddya think, I’m retarded? I know you work for the government and shit.”

I then gave Adam a basic overview of what we did at our agency, the 17th one that’s never mentioned in the annual National Intelligence Estimate. Without getting too deeply into classified material, I told Adam what I did for a living because I was beginning to suspect more and more that in some indefinable way, we would need my employers to shield him.

I debated whether to tell him the real story of our Grandpa Bernard then decided to. I never thought it was possible for Adam’s huge eyes to get any bigger yet somehow he managed it.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter Six

2009-04-27T04:13:00.000-07:00

Abu Ghraib Prison, west of Baghdad, Iraq, Nov. 7

“Look, I’ve got to go. I love you, too, Mom. Kiss Adam for me, ‘kay? Bye bye.”

Elle (After the first letter of her first name Laura) Moss clapped her cell phone shut as the Iraqi intelligence officials approached her at the end of their pantomime of an investigation. She self-consciously straightened the green badge of whatever intelligence agency out of the 16 known ones for whom she purported to work this week. Pocketing the phone, she began closing the gap between herself and the Iraqis.

She wasn’t sure what they’d expected to find considering al Islamiyah’s now seemingly absent, alleged ghost. After all, it was foolhardy at best, dangerous at worst, to consider lack of evidence as proof of anything. We learned that the hard way with Rumsfeld and Cheney. Besides, their inspection was a purely ceremonial one, like the kind Presidents and other visiting heads of state give as they strut past foreign troops. Except this symbolic inspection didn’t have the press to dutifully record it. The Iraqi government, as Col. Waterston told both her and Hans Dietrich, the world-renowned ghost hunter, was particularly eager to reclaim control of the prison, ahem, facility, according to the good Colonel, and that simply wouldn’t happen as long as there was a poltergeist on the premises.

Elle Moss was officially there in the capacity of a liaison officer for a certain intelligence agency, someone to help facilitate the transfer of authority from the Americans to the Iraqis. The idea was never to turn the notorious prison back into a prison but a museum to memorialize the abuses that had taken place there. No doubt, the Iraqi intelligence officials weren’t thinking of just Saddam’s own excesses at Abu Ghraib. In fact, they were probably secretly tempted to devote a wing or at least a tier to Bush’s, Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s own excesses that began right after Shock and Awe in March 2003.

Unofficially, Elle Moss was not there to liaise with the Iraqis but to investigate Hans Dietrich. Her people, her real people, had been investigating that dirtbag for over two years. There was nothing much that anyone in the world except for Dietrich himself couldn’t tell her about him. She was an expert on this guy, his blood-spattered past as a Stasi official and how he’d managed to not only escape his deserved comeuppance but even procure for himself a second and lucrative career as a “paranormal investigator.” So Laura “Elle” Moss was fooling everyone but herself by becoming part of the window dressing. While it wasn’t exactly on a par with Colin Powell’s bedtime fairy tales of WMD to the UN Security Council, it was important that the American intelligence community be represented as fully as the Iraqis’. And the CIA and other pertinent agencies didn’t think this was important enough to show up for. So it was a snap for Elle’s own well-connected if little-understood agency to shoehorn her in.

“I trust everything met to your satisfaction, Mr. Director?”

The tall and burly Iraqi intelligence chief curtly nodded his head and seemed almost shamed in having to deal with a woman who was anywhere close to his equal. She was 25, nowhere near Directorate level but she carried herself with a bearing that suggested hidden power and influence, like the stately carriage of an iceberg keeping 90% of itself under water. She had been asked to wear a kaffiyeh, or head scarf, to show her modesty and she politely but firmly refused.

The truly comical thing about this inspection was the complete absence of electronic equipment to document anything they would see. And there wasn’t much chance of that happening because the inspection was carried out in broad daylight. Ghosts, like vampires, tended to be shy around UV light and were generally nocturnal. She wasn’t exactly an expert on vampires whether or not they existed. Ghosts, on the other hand, were something she knew a thing or two about. In fact, it was almost a family profession.

After exchanging the usual diplomatic closing pleasantries and passing the details of the transfer of control to the detail men in attendance, Elle briskly walked out of the prison. In spite of her impressive knowledge of the paranormal, she wasn’t what you’d call an adept or a sensitive, people who claim to be able to see spirits (unlike her baby brother Adam). She just wanted to leave the prison because its sheer reputation oppressed her. It was the horrible knowledge of what had gone on, horrible knowledge that even Seymour Hersh had never learned and uncovered on the pages of the New Yorker. Earlier in the year, when the Obama administration released about a dozen more pictures of the abuses Americans had another opportunity to remember and not be allowed to forget what had been done in their good name. It remained to be seen if any permanent lessons were learned.

She was able to let her mind wander to personal matters once she was back in her borrowed Humvee. Several times she’d tried texting and calling her little brother once she got the terrible news about the accident that killed his girlfriend and, for a brief time, Adam himself. She should’ve known that even Adam, who practically slept with his iPhone, wouldn’t be accessible for a while after what had happened on Halloween night. To date, he still wasn’t answering his phone and she began wondering if it was irreparably damaged in the crash. She kept telling herself that was the reason why he never got around to calling her on her own phone.

She never told her younger skateboarding sibling but it was partly his “glimpses”, as he’d come to call them, that got her into her present line of work. The story he’d told the family years ago about having seen their stillborn brother, umbilical cord and all, standing on his own grave wasn’t the kind that Mom and Dad loved to dust off and trot out for polite company. Still, there was no denying that the kid at the very least believed that he saw something in that cemetery. He may have been an award-winning prevaricator who’d conned Mom and Dad countless times but he never fooled his big sister. And when Laura looked into his wide green eyes, she knew he’d seen something that would change at least his own life.

She toyed with the idea of calling Adam again then thought better of it. Whether or not his phone was junk, she’d see him soon enough. Now that her business in Baghdad was finally concluded, she prepared to hop on a MAC flight and take enough time off to swing by Massachusetts to pay her family a visit.

I knew it was sketchy beyond belief doing this, visiting Clarissa’s grave. It wasn’t lost on me what kind of shit went down the last time I went to a cemetery. That’s why, until today, I avoided them like our rabbi does pork chops. Still, I couldn’t not be there. I had to pay my last respects, to get closure, to torture myself on what could’ve been between us. Her father the Congressman already got his headstone so I guess the government moves on certain things. I avoided looking at file footage on the news of the big turnout for the family’s mass funeral yet for some reason actually being here by myself didn’t hurt as much as seeing the public outpouring of grief. I heard the Speaker of the House was there and a bunch of other politicians and even the Vice President put in a brief appearance.

But now I had the place all to myself. I paid my last respects in my own way to Clarissa’s mother and father just to get that out of the way before concentrating on her plot. Obviously, considering the time of the year, grass had yet to grow over them and they sat on the earth like barely-healed scars. I noticed with some irritation that there was just one massive headstone for the entire family and obviously it was put there to honor the Congressman. His wife and daughter had to share it.

It was a miniature obelisk like the kind you see in Egypt only it had a Star of David on it and the names of all three. I hugged my skateboard a little more tightly as I looked at Clarissa’s birth and death dates. She had touched my board and, before she got her own, even rode on it when I was teaching her how to do Ollies and other simple tricks right after we got out of the hospital together. Suddenly, my board got a whole lot more precious than it already was.

God damn you, Clarissa, what the hell were you thinking trying to outrun the cops? Even if they were there to bust us over the party, it was just a fucking party. Maybe it would’ve resulted in being grounded for a month after a few mentions on Republican blogs. But anything your folks would’ve done to you, even if it meant us being separated for that month, would’ve been a fuck of a lot better than this.

What wouldn’t you go back to? Your house or the hospital? I thought you were past all that, that you were, if anything, more normal than me. Why would you fear getting sent back to the hospital’s psych unit just for leading the cops on a high speed chase?

And did I really see you, your ghost, one that, thankfully, didn’t make an appearance at the cemetery? Or was it just a dream? The more I thought about what she said, the more convinced I was that she wasn’t saying “Frias” but “Free us.” But that only led to more questions. “Free us” from whom or what?

Hans Dietrich simply called it “The Hole.” It was a most amazing hole, albeit one in a purely metaphorical sense. In actuality, it was a larger, more outsized version of the “black hole” around which they’d built a Humvee that they took on “investigations.” The Hole wasn’t large to accommodate the growing number of restless ghosts and spirits. After all, such beings don’t view or move in conventional spatial dimensions as you and I do. But the huger, stationary Hole was larger because of the sheer volume of energy it required to keep them fixed within a manmade vortex that prevented them from slipping into another, uncharted dimension.

Dietrich dimmed the lights as he approached the massive structure, which was about the size of a tiny cottage such as you’d find on Cape Cod, so he could peer into the thick window that was made of bulletproof glass (in spite of their non-corporeality, they could get quite nasty). Generally, the inside of the structure was actually illuminated with the roiling energy of the partial and full body apparitions within it. Despite the august but posthumous assemblage, he was there to see just one, his newest acquisition: Mursi al Islamiyah, the terrorist mastermind who was rumored to be one of bin Laden’s countless second in commands.

The al Qaeda terrorist apparently had succeeded beyond his wildest expectations at the Sheraton in Boston. Among the countless EVPs that were recorded around the clock in the Hole, Dietrich heard what he thought was Tim McVeigh’s ghost crow about al Islamiyah actually chasing people around the hotel, people like Congressman Feingold. The terrorist was unusually adept at manifesting and visually presenting himself to people, even touching them briefly. The bastard even knew how to fly, another skill not mastered if ever by more conventional spirits.

With all that energy being drawn from the air, Dietrich mused, it must have been freezing cold in that penthouse. Served the decadent bastards right. The German had nothing really personal against the Who’s Who that was assembled at the Sheraton. It was merely a wakeup call to the complacent, a calling card from Dietrich warning of something far more disastrous.

He cupped his black gloved hands around his eyes as he peered into the window, looking for al Islamiyah’s unique energy signature. At last he found it and he banged on the three inch-thick glass. He got the terrorist’s attention and he floated to the window, his voice picked up by the Hole’s countless built-in microphones. He appeared to say something in Arabic and Breck wasn’t there to translate. But Dietrich wasn’t fazed by that. He thumbed the “talk” button on the Hole’s outer hull and said, “Speak English, you cretin.”

Dietrich knew all too well that al Islamiyah spoke perfect English, having gotten his college education at Eton in the UK on a Fulbright scholarship. The terrorist’s ghost distended his jaw and screamed, making his face much longer than it was in life and Dietrich smiled and shook his head. In his line of work, he’d seen and heard it all but this one was a fucking freak, the total package, the rarest of all ghosts. Moreso than any other entity he’d ever captured, Mursi al Islamiyah was seemingly more adroit at acclimating himself to the netherworld, having gleaned a vast array of supernatural disciplines. Most restless spirits, if at all, manage to partially master one, perhaps two. Mursi al Islamiyah seemingly could do everything of which a ghost was rumored to be capable and perhaps more. And Dietrich wondered what other tricks he could or would show him either now or in the future.

He thumbed the “talk” button again.

“Once, during an investigation in Ireland, we were hunting a criminal just like you. Toward the end of the hunt, one of my team members felt something go through him and the next thing he knew he was looking at his organs being pulled out of his torso even though his flesh wasn’t broken. He was literally turned inside out. Irish ghosts are especially nasty.

“In my line of work, my friend, I have seen and heard it all and you screaming makes me laugh. I would get more out of a conversation with you, for you to show me something I haven’t seen before. So make use of that Eton College education and impress me.”

“I. Don’t. Do. Tricks. You dog,” al Islamiyah hissed, his face back to normal dimensions. Dietrich tapped the “talk” button again.

“Tim McVeigh tells me differently. He said you did some splendid tricks on Halloween night in Boston, Massachusetts. Good job.”

Mursi al Islamiyah looked behind him as if searching for the Oklahoma City bomber then turned his attention back to Dietrich.

“You. Will. Pay. For this, heathen.” Dietrich touched the “talk” button for the briefest of instants to sarcastically murmur, “Ooh.”

“Some. Day. We will. Find. A way. Out. And you. Will be. Sorry.”

There wasn’t much chance of that happening, thought the ex Stasi policeman. The technology made available to him came courtesy of the Americans, who’d been looking into controlling supernatural dimensions and detaining spirits since the late 1960’s. The CIA project, named Operation Casper, had been axed by a secret act of Congress in 1974. Formerly attached to their Psy Ops division that also did R&D on remote psychics, the project’s existence was mainly rumor and conspiracy theory and had acquired a fantastic air to it similar to the Philadelphia Experiment or the Majestic Twelve.

However, unlike the Philadelphia Experiment and MJ 12, Operation Casper actually had existed and the neglected technology that only lack of funding could stop still provided a great head start to what Dietrich had had in mind twenty years ago when it was obvious the Stasi’s days were numbered. Luckily, he was able to make contact with one of the few Casper research scientists still alive, someone who had access to copies of the notes. He’d fallen on hard times and was willing to sell them to the highest bidder. Considering the fantastical nature of the research, it wasn’t surprising that he had no takers until it reached the ears of Dietrich.

Hans had listened because he knew such things were possible. In his youth, he’d had a paranormal experience of his own that involved both his parents right after the Nazi years, an experience that he’d never shared with anyone.

Just days after selling Dietrich the technology that he and his own experts were able to complete and perfect, the penniless scientist was later found dead on the banks of the Charles River on New Year’s Eve 1989. Despite his veins being loaded with high grade heroin that he shouldn’t have been able to afford, Dr. Bernard Moss’s death was later ruled a suicide by the Boston City Police Department.

Dietrich touched the “talk” button one more time and said, “Once again, good job on Halloween night. I may be a heathen dog, but that’s still better than being a trained dog.” He smiled cruelly at the terrorist’s ghost and walked out of the enormous structure. Mursi al Islamiyah silently screamed, heard only by his fellow dead.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter Five

2009-04-27T04:12:00.000-07:00

November 5, 2009

I was so totally out of it that I wasn’t even aware there was a hand on my arm much less whose it was. My head felt like I landed on it without a helmet after a grind rail gone horribly wrong. The left side of my rib cage screamed out in protest every time I inhaled. I immediately tried to reconstruct the accident. OK, I said to myself, my head hurts because I wasn’t wearing a seat belt and when the car turned over, I got dumped on the roof. The left side of my ribs hurt probably because it hit the steering wheel or Clarissa’s elbow when we… Clarissa!

I tried to sit up and I felt the pressure on my arm for the first time. I turned to my right and saw Clarissa sitting beside me. I immediately took her face in my hands and kissed her. Her flesh was cool as was her attitude but she still kissed me back.

“Clarissa, babe! Are you OK?” She didn’t say a thing but just continued smiling at me in a sweet but sad way. As my eyes got adjusted I saw that she had a few wounds on her face and hands but what struck me as odd was that none of them were treated. No bandages, no stitches, no nothing.

“I miss you, Adam,” she finally said only she said it in such a soft whisper that I could barely hear her. The present tense also hit me as a little odd. It would’ve made more sense if she said, “I missed you,” past tense. But just seeing her next to my bed was almost more than I could handle. I was just glad she was there and alright.

“What happened?”

“You went back,” she whispered again. “I miss you, babe.”

I reached out to her and held her cold face in my hands again. Maybe it was the light but she seemed to be almost completely drained of color, like a character you see in an old black and white movie.

“Back from where? How long was I out?” Once again, she still refused to answer but her hand moved from my right arm to my face. It was as cool as her own face and it almost felt like she wasn’t touching me at all. When I tried to sit up again, I felt something yanking on my pecker and that’s when I noticed the catheter. I also felt embarrassed beyond words that Clarissa had to see me hooked up to something that was attached to my dick.

“We need you, Adam.”

“Who needs me?” I asked her. I could understand her saying that she needed me but who else? My folks? Yeah, where were Mom and Dad? No way they wouldn’t be here.

“Free us, Adam. Free us.” I looked at her and wondered who “Frias” was. I didn’t know anybody by that name and when I looked for the catheter bag under the bed that’s when I noticed that Clarissa wasn’t sitting next to me, after all. She was standing up, the bottom half of her body buried in the floor. I looked up at her and her wounds began to bleed like crazy. I screamed and that’s when my folks and a few of the nurses came running into the room. When they turned the light on, Clarissa was gone.

My parents and the nurses in my room tried to tell me that it was just a dream, that there was no way Clarissa Feingold could’ve been sitting much less standing next to me, her body buried in the floor up to the waist. It bothered me either way whether I believed my own eyes or their version of what I just saw. I much preferred to think that Clarissa was there even with the creepiness factor. But what bothered me was how they mentioned her name.

“Well, if she wasn’t here, then where is she?” I asked. My parents and the nurses looked at each other with sadness that put ice cubes in my stomach. “Where is she, God damnit?” I yelled.

“Adam,” my mother said as she walked around to where Clarissa may or may not have been, “you were in a coma for four days. You need to rest and let the doctors and nurses take care of you.”

“I was out for four days? Alright, whatever. I just wanna know where my girlfriend is.”

I never referred to Clarissa as my girlfriend and they all looked at eachother again with even more sadness than before. My mother put her hand to her face and took off like a fucking bat out of Hell. My Dad turned to me for a second then took off after my mother.

“Where’s Clarissa?” I asked one of the nurses as she checked some machine. She put her head down before turning to me and sighed.

“She was killed in the accident, Honey. Her family’s funeral was yesterday. I’m so sorry.”

I got to sit in bed for the next day or two, my thoughts occasionally interrupted by Mom and Dad coming in, nurses coming back and forth to give me medicine that I pretended to take before spitting it out in the toilet. Some of it may have been for pain but I didn’t give a shit. I welcomed the pain. It helped clarify my thoughts. I sank into a pit of depression finding out that the girl I love was killed but no one ever told me what happened to her parents and why and how the entire family could’ve been wiped out in two different places on the same night was never explained to me.

Finally, the same nurse who broke to me the horrible news of Clarissa’s death came in and asked both my parents and me if a Boston City homicide detective named Ed Coffey could talk to me. I desperately wanted to talk to him, too, anyone whose name wasn’t Moss or wore crepe shoes carrying medicine I didn’t need. I practically demanded that they bring him in even before my folks said it was OK.

The poor kid looked like an anime doll someone threw out a car window and that got run over by traffic. I pulled up a chair next to him and asked him how he was. He just stared at me, tears standing in his big green eyes and simply asked me what happened. Even though I was there to question him about why Clarissa Feingold took off and led the Braintree police on a high speed pursuit, years of experience interrogating suspects and witnesses taught me that if you want to get a little, you got to give a little. The truth was what the kid needed, in my estimation, although I could see why they’d embargo the flow of information to him considering what the boy had been through.

So I told him in the gentlest way I could about what happened to his girlfriend. However, when you’re informing someone of how a loved one died it’s really no different than using a fucking sledgehammer that’s covered with velvet. The blows are just as crushing.

Considering that the house was still full of a bunch of underaged minors who were obviously under the influence and that there was a party at the Congressman’s house on Halloween night, my guess was that the Feingold girl panicked when she saw the cops there to tell her about her parents’ deaths. Of course, she had no way of knowing that and had assumed they were there just to break up the party and maybe throw her and her friends in jail over the illegal alcohol until they could get bailed out by their folks. I never stopped to consider the pressure that the child of a politician holding national office would have to live under, meeting higher standards than other kids, having to keep up unreasonably perfect appearances.

The Moss kid’s eyes got wider than bed pans when I gave him the basics of what happened to the Feingolds. All things considered, the girl was killed in an almost ordinary, pedestrian way compared to her folks. Her neck was broken instantly when the Range Rover flipped.

“So, why did your girlfriend hit the gas when she saw that cruiser?”

“I dunno, Detective,” he murmured. “She just said she wasn’t going back. She kept saying it over and over.”

I wondered whether she meant going back home into the waiting arms of the police or back to the hospital and the waiting arms of the psychiatric nursing staff. Either way, her refusal to go back made sense.

“So she never knew that her folks were dead?” I rhetorically asked.

“No. How could she? She tried calling them and they never picked up.” That also made sense. When the coroner’s office began picking up the bodies we heard cell phones going off one by one, especially after the news broke of the mass suicide. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I ever heard and it briefly reminded me of the 9/11 firefighters’ locating beacons going off long after they were buried by tons of rubble at Ground Zero.

Strictly speaking, I really had no business talking to this Adam Moss kid because the odds were slim to none that he could shed any light on what happened in Boston. Still, he was the last one to be seen alive with the recently deceased daughter of two of the victims. I was just about to get up and Adam asked me as I flipped my notebook shut, “Then please explain to me how come Clarissa was sitting or standing next to my bed when I came out of my coma?”

I asked the nursing staff if they could call up the surveillance video of Adam Moss at the moment he woke up and they did. The black and white video was a bit grainy but I could see the kid open his eyes and continue lying on his back as he looked at the ceiling, apparently deep in thought. After a minute or so, he turned to his right and reached out with both his hands as if to touch or hold something or somebody that wasn’t there. He then appeared to kiss thin air. Then I could see his lips move, holding a one-sided conversation. Reaching out and kissing thin air again. Eventually, after a few minutes of this tragic pantomime, he looked at something on or near the floor and freaked out just moments before the nursing staff and his parents rushed in. There were a couple of other things in the video that tickled the back of my mind but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I told the nursing staff to tell the security company to save that video in case I needed to see it again.

Before the Mosses gave me their permission to question their son, they took me outside and told me a bit about his history.

“Look, Detective Coffey,” his mother had begun, “Adam has a… history, let’s call it.”

“A history of what?” I asked.

“He claims to have seen ghosts on several occasions.”

Okaaay… “OK,” I said matter-of-factly.

“It goes back several years. When Adam was about 10, my husband and I lost a child during childbirth…”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Moss.”

“Thank you. And Adam claimed to have seen his brother standing on top of his own grave. He even said he saw the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck. That’s what killed our baby.”

A chill had gone up my spine. This was already turning into more than I’d bargained for. The few words I’d exchanged with the kid led me to think that he was as lucid as could be expected under the circumstances, especially after finding out that his girlfriend was just killed. But why have a delusion of seeing the ghost of a girlfriend whom you think is still alive? Adam never claimed that he saw her ghost. In fact, no one ever mentioned the word, least of all his parents.

“Our son was obsessed with the spirit world and ghosts and every now and then he’ll insist he’d seen one,” his father said. “Finally, when he was about 15, he made a suicide attempt…”

I wasn’t sure at this point if I wanted to hear more about the family’s most confidential medical issues but all the same, I had to know what I was dealing with when I went to question him, even if he wasn’t a material witness in a homicide investigation that may not be a homicide investigation.

“That’s when he met Clarissa in the psychiatric wing of Newton Wellesley Hospital. The two of them struck up an instant friendship and they seemed to be good for each other. We figured the family’s also Jewish, solid, upstanding citizens, our Congressman, even. We had no problem with them seeing each other. Then, this…” Mr. Moss had raised then helplessly dropped his arm in the direction of his son’s room and looked as if he was about to cry. I closed my notebook, even though I hadn’t written anything into it before getting their permission the question their son. In light of what they’d told me, writing down their disclosures would’ve been redundant. I wasn’t very likely to forget much if any of it.

The kid could’ve been having a dream or a hallucination like they all said, although it’s odd to have a sleepwalking episode right after coming out of a coma. But it wasn’t until I got back to my office and again looked at the autopsy photos of the Feingold girl that I realized the Moss boy had perfectly described Clarissa’s wounds down to their exact locations, wounds that he was never conscious to see. I got this crazy idea that perhaps the people at the Sheraton were frightened to death and barely began to speculate why before dismissing the idea as absurd.

Braintree, MA, November 7, 2009

The night before the hospital turned me loose, I heard Clarissa’s voice in my ear. If she was in bed with me, she would’ve been behind me and I was too scared shitless to turn around and it didn’t matter much if I was dreaming or not. The first, last and only thing I heard her whisper was, “Free us, Adam. We are not pebbles.” I had two blankets and a sheet on top of me and I felt like I was sleeping naked on the tundra of the Antarctic.

One drawback to being a suicide boy is that your parents tend to fucking coddle you and keep shit from you. When you find out about it, they then justify it by saying that it’s all for your own good but that’s horseshit. For instance, I think I had a right to know that I had a near death experience before my four day-long coma. Little omissions like that kind of make me tweak out.

I found out about my being clinically dead after the accident when I heard my Mom talking to my sister Laura on the phone after I got home. It ticked me off a little that she couldn’t make it to be with the rest of the family and even from Mom’s end of the conversation I could almost hear Laura using her secret agent government job as an excuse as to why she couldn’t come up to see me.

Turns out she may have had a good excuse, after all: She was in Baghdad, Iraq doing something for the CIA or NSA or one of those other alphabet spy outfits. She was never very forthcoming about what she did or who she worked for and, given her line of work, who could blame her?

But while Laura wasn’t there for me to tweak out on, Mom and Dad were and I confronted them right away.

“Adam, Honey, try to look at it from our point of view,” Mom said, “You needed to be protected and you weren’t strong enough yet to hear about that, especially after hearing about Clarissa.”

“Protected from what or who, Mom? Did you ever think that maybe I’m a little bit tougher than you and Dad think? That I may not be the same kid who opened up his wrists two years ago? You keep telling me to look it from your point of view. But did either of you ever once try to look at shit from my point of view?”

“Adam, was it really all that important for you to know? The important thing is that you made it back and you’re safe at home here with us.”

Well, yeah, it’s important. Because the more time that went by, the more I was convinced that when they brought me back from the dead at the accident site I didn’t come back alone.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter Four

2009-04-27T04:10:00.000-07:00

November 1, 2009

With all due respect to other professions, being a cop, especially a homicide detective, has got to be the most frustrating job on earth. We’re constantly at a disadvantage, unable to use our skills until someone gets killed. Even the happiest of resolutions is cold comfort for the surviving relatives and the best we can say is that we took a killer off the streets before they killed anyone else. It’s like trying to tie up a tourniquet on a spurting wound only after the victim has lost a lot of blood. All you can do is damage control.

We’re also at a disadvantage in that we’re playing catch up with a perp who usually has some nominal skills in covering up after themselves. And even the simplest of timelines and the most unsophisticated of MOs still have to be painstakingly reconstructed, like pulling a handful of paper strips out of a shredder. You may be able, with a lot of tape and even more patience, to reconstruct the original document but you’ll rarely if ever get it perfect.

Then there are cases that are simply nightmares, cases involving dead bodies that yield few clues and offer nothing substantial or plausible in the way of motive, means and opportunity. The mass suicide at the Sheraton on Halloween night was one of those cases. For starters, we didn’t know whether to classify it as a mass suicide or a mass murder. There were no murder weapons, little in the way of useful forensic evidence, no apparent motive and the locked doors and secluded penthouse offered virtually no opportunity.

It’s the kind of case that makes other homicide detectives wonder if they should’ve taken that civil service exam to become mailmen, instead.

I especially was even more at a disadvantage than usual because I was HALO’d into this case with three hours of sleep and only Rodriguez’s horrible coffee to compensate for my lack of REM.

“Who the fuck made this coffee? Lucretia Borgia?” I looked around and Roddy smirked. I’d always suspected that Rodriguez made the most horrible coffee on earth just to make our chief break down and use some of his discretionary budget to buy us a coffee pod maker or at least a French Press. If his coffee was any worse, Internal Affairs would be investigating him and CSI would have our coffee maker at their lab.

I walked to the fax machine and was disappointed to find nothing from the Coroner’s Office. The sole survivor we’d found in the penthouse was Sylvia Feingold, Congressman Feingold’s wife. She’d managed to say one word before she’d passed away: Clarissa. She was calling out for the couple’s only child, their daughter Clarissa. The fax we were waiting for was the autopsy results from the ME and we’d already alerted the Braintree PD to go to the Congressman’s house to give their daughter the bad news. I already felt sorry for the poor kid. She was only 17 years old and already had one suicide attempt to her credit by the time she was 15.

As with Senator Dumont, Congressman Feingold abandoned his wife and leaped out of one of the windows on the floor below the penthouse. As it turned out, he was the one wearing the angel costume that left behind the feather we’d found at one of the crime scenes. So far, that was the only mystery we were able to solve. Up to this point, we came up dry again and again. I was beginning to feel like an idiot put in a bare round room and told to look for the penny in the corner.

I lurched back to my desk and checked my email. Ron the CSI guy had just sent me the picture attachment of Mrs. Dumont’s dead face with the ice crystals on it. I opened up the file and magnified it but it told me nothing usable especially when pixilation became an issue and ruined the resolution. I was utterly incapable of understanding what could’ve caused the crystallization on her skin then filed it away in the ever-growing To Do list in the back of my mind.

Braintree, MA, November 1, 2009

Some of the other kids who didn’t pass out had gone home, still leaving behind about a dozen others who’d either gone under or were about to. Just on the off chance Clarissa’s folks would come home, we had to get rid of them as well as all the beer cans and I volunteered to help her. In order to get a 20 on their location, Clarissa tried calling both her parents’ cell phones but they never picked up, which was odd. What was even more fucked up was that they hadn’t once called in to check up on their daughter. If anything, Clarissa’s folks were even more neurotic Jewish parents than my own, which is saying something. After all, she was their only child and, like me, had a “history” as professional people like to euphemistically say.

Before we got started with the garbage collection, she and I stood in front of one of the bedroom doors, our arms wrapped around each other’s waists. My little Trojan soldier finally remembered half his purpose in life and was beginning to rise to attention. Clarissa had taken off her bandanna and had pulled her gleaming red hair back in its usual high and tight ponytail and looked smoking hot. As we stood in the upstairs hallway, we swayed gently from side to side, her left hand around my back but her right on my chest, our crotches barely touching. It was like she was pulling me toward her while ready to push me away at any moment.

It was obvious she wanted to but she was freaked out by the thought of her parents coming home at any moment plus there were still a few of our idiot friends downstairs who were technically awake and slurring stupid comments to each other.

“Adam, it doesn’t feel right,” she half said/half whispered. “Not tonight, baby.”

I didn’t want to press her too hard on it and give her the impression that I only wanted to bury my little Trojan soldier with full honors ending with a ten squirt salute. Still, this was the closest we’d ever come to actually making out and neither one of us had ever been this close to walking into a bedroom together. Look at it from my point of view, dude: It was like standing between third and home plate with no outs and winding up getting stranded. So near and yet so far.

I always loved and always will love how she could so perfectly and smoothly pull her hair back without even using a brush and I stroked the drawn back part of her hair, playing with her perfect ponytail. I then hugged her and said, “OK. When the time is right.” Looks like Danica Patrick would get some attention tonight, after all. Clarissa whispered, “Thank you, babe. I knew you’d understand.” I nodded and my little soldier wilted back into parade rest if not totally at ease.

“Let’s take the garbage out. Then we’ll get the beer cans later.” She laughed and we started our way downstairs. It looked like we wouldn’t be getting help from any of our remaining friends even though Clarissa set up garbage bags all over the house for the beer cans and told everyone to use them. Of course, they didn’t and the morons left blue and silver beer cans on the mantle, the furniture, the floor, even leaving some outside. One of her biggest worries was that some got spilled on the rug or on the couches and chairs. The last thing we wanted to do was hunt the entire house for wet spots, blot up stale, piss-warm beer and to get out deodorizer and a hair dryer.

Most of the beer cans were a quarter to almost totally full and we schlepped around the house, walking over lifeless bodies and throwing aluminum and beer into trash bags. While we were collecting beer cans like a couple of rag pickers, we asked them to leave, our voices getting louder and angrier when they didn’t listen. I even gently kicked a couple of them in the ass.

Obviously, we couldn’t throw out 96 beer cans in her folks’ trash can but Clarissa had that covered. She knew of an unlocked dumpster across town and we could pitch them in that. We found about 5 or 6 unopened beers in the fridge and we took them, too.

“You assholes better be gone by the time me and Adam get back. You all got five minutes.” Few of them listened. “I mean it!” she said much louder. “I’ll call the cops and tell them you invaded my house. Don’t forget, you’re all hammered and wouldn’t pass a breathalyzer test and we’re taking away all the evidence.” She hoisted a bag to punctuate her point. “It’ll look like you were already wasted when you got here.”

At the mention of the police, some of our friends stirred from the floor and the furniture and began looking for their skateboards. Of course, Clarissa wouldn’t call the cops even if her old man was a Congressman. They’d alert her folks, they’d come home sooner and want to know why a bunch of drunken kids suddenly showed up at her door on Halloween night. But they were too baked to put that together.

“It helps having a Dad who’s a politician.” she sweetly smiled as she took the keys for their Range Rover off the hall table. “You learn from the best how to bluff and play hard ball.”

We loaded the two contractor bags of beer cans into the back and Clarissa backed out of the driveway. Like she said, there was a construction site with an open dumpster and we tossed both bags into it. By the time we got back to her street, the Braintree police were already in her driveway.

“Oh shit!” she said, putting her hand over her mouth and slamming on the brakes. The front door was wide open and the cops were already inside. We saw them talking to our friends and they gestured this way and that, probably telling them that we just took off but didn’t know where we were.

“Fuck. Now what?”

“No way am I going back there,” she said. Clarissa put the Rover in reverse and backed up where we just came from, did a three point turn in a neighbor’s driveway and peeled off.

“Clarissa, you can’t just take off. That’s your house.”

“No, no fuckin’ way,” she said. We were both assuming that the cops showed up when one of the neighbors complained about the noise and the sight of our stupid friends outside. I mean, it was obvious that we were having a party and maybe one of them called her folks and the police. Either way, she was totally boned if no one else. I felt guilty because I was part of the party.

I was about to tell her that she had to face the music and go back when a second Braintree cruiser passed us. The cop must’ve recognized the congressman’s car because he immediately put on his lights and siren and turned around. Then Clarissa did the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen her do: She hit the gas pedal and tried to run away. I wondered at that moment if we were going to wind up on one of those tabloid shows about stupid criminals and car chases narrated by some smarmy smart ass.

“Clarissa? Honey? This isn’t a good idea. It’s only a party, after all. It’s not like anyone died or anything. But if you try to run away from the cops that’s exactly what may happen!”

All she did was look behind her, her ponytail almost whipping my face twice and hit the gas harder even as she took a sharp left. By this time, we were back at the construction site and she never saw a gravel pit that was on my side. The Range Rover was already practically on two wheels when she took that turn doing 70 or so and the pile turned us over on the driver side. It suddenly occurred to me that neither of us was wearing our seat belts because we were just going on a five minute drive. My body landed on top of her as the car began to roll and the last things I remembered hearing was Clarissa screaming, glass breaking and police sirens.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter Three

2009-02-07T09:20:00.000-08:00

Chapter Three
Halloween Night, six hours earlier

Sk8rgrrl342: bring yr sk8board
Emoghostboi90: ya. cant promise ne thing. 2 sketchy rt now
Sk8rgrrl342: cluck cluck LOL!
Emoghostboi90: STFU ill b there
Sk8rgrrl342: cluck cluck LMFAO!
Emoghostboi90: POS
Sk8rgrrl342: k

And chicks call us dicks. When I said in that private AIM chat room that it was too sketchy to duck out of my house to go to a Halloween party, I wasn’t shitting, dude. I was grounded at the time over that board. I cut Calculus a couple of weeks ago so I could go boarding with my friends at the skateboard park on John LeRoy Drive.

It was wicked easy for Clarissa to accuse me of being chickenshit . It wasn’t her cute little ass she was putting on the line by risking getting grounded until the next Ice Age.

“What’s POS mean?” my Mom asked from behind me. Luckily, I already scrolled up the part in the dialog box where Clarissa asked me to bring my skateboard.

“What are you, reading my chat room messages? C’mon, you ever heard of the fourth amendment?”

“Adam, as long as you’re…”

“Yeah, yeah.” The rest of her sentence would’ve no doubt ended with, “…living under our roof, you have no rights to privacy. You want privacy, move out.” Which wasn’t an option for me. I was still in high school and only 17. “And POS stands for ‘piece of shit.’”

“Why are you talking dirty on the Internet?”

Luckily, I have a typical middle-aged Mom who couldn’t tell the difference between an Apache server and an Apache Indian. God help me if she ever takes a computer class. That’ll cark my whole social life and I’ll have to learn how to type with two hands again. I’m kidding about that, by the way.

But for now she didn’t and couldn’t know that “POS” really stands for “Parent Over Shoulder.” It’s the growing glossary of shorthand that we use to inconspicuously alert those we’re chatting or texting with to STFU.

“There,” my Mom said as she closed my sock drawer. “Now you have some clean socks for a change. You know, Hun, you’re more than old enough to throw a load in the washer once a week.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I droned with barely concealed impatience, waiting for the sound of my door to close so I could continue the chat. When I did, I looked behind me to see if she was really gone. Sometimes, parents sucker you like that and only pretend to leave to see what shit you’ll pull next.

OK, so maybe your parents aren’t that sneaky but mine are. My Mom and Dad rewrote the book on neurotic Jewish parenting. No wonder my older sister Laura already had one foot out the door when she got her high school diploma.

I went back to typing on my Dell laptop, whispering the words as I wrote them. “back. ill go when i can. meet me at the park.” Clarissa instantly responded with “k” and logged off before I did.

I got up and took off my pants and pulled a pair of board shorts off the floor of my closet, sniffed them and put them on. We Emo boys are about fashion and if you’re a skateboarder, you have to be especially trendy. Still, I privately admitted that half my reason for wearing baggy board shorts is to hide my boner when I get within 100 yards of Clarissa Feingold.

I knew even ducking out for a couple of hours was almost a suicide mission but what was I supposed to do while all my friends were at the coolest Halloween party in Braintree? Jerk off to my Danica Patrick poster hanging over my bed? My mother already caught me doing that last summer.

I changed into another tee shirt, the green Tony Hawk one then finger-arranged my hair. Long bangs in the front, sides pushed forwards, short and spiky in the back. I was just about the only blond Emo boy in America and I always felt self-conscious about that. That’s why I dyed some purple streaks into it to break up the boring yellow. But I was having a great hair day and luckily it was carrying over into early evening. Dude, with my great hair and big green eyes, I can’t believe I’m still a virgin. Well, maybe after Clarissa got a couple of beers in her, who knows how sorry she’d feel for me?

And, yeah, I’m kidding about that, too. I’d never take advantage of a drunk chick. My Dad succeeded in drumming that much into my head. “How do you think your big sister Laura came into the world?”

Unfortunately, Dad wasn’t joking about that.

I spritzed a little more styling gel over the back of my hair and fingered it some more. Then I reached for my iPod, put the buds in my ears, set it to “shuffle” and started listening to my play list. I grabbed my skateboard leaning against my closet door and carefully opened my bedroom window. Hello, Mr. Tree Limb. Going down.

Clarissa Feingold’s folks were at some Halloween party in Boston and stupidly told her that they may stay the night at the hotel. At the very least, they wouldn’t be back until long after we all left her house. We all agreed to meet at the skateboard park near Route 37 on John LeRoy Drive before going over there. It was colder than a witch’s tit but who cared? I hadn’t set one toe on my board in days and was starting to get antsy. Chicks as a rule aren’t into skateboarding but Clarissa’s an exception. I love watching her on her skateboard. I especially love it when she does Ollies and her big boobs bounce up and down for like twenty seconds after she lands. Hey, just because I’m on the honor roll doesn’t mean I have to stop being a dude, right?

I rolled toward the park and could already see some of my friends. I looked for Clarissa and finally found her. I entered the park, slapping hands on the way and kicked the front of the board up into my hand. Knowing how to enter a skateboard park is almost as important as knowing how to dress for it and Clarissa, even though she was still a newbie getting the hang of Ollies, appreciated a kewl entrance. Perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect entrance. So far so good. I could almost hear my cherry popping in the distance.

“Hey!” she exclaimed. I jerked my head up, acting cooler than I really was. I was already halfway to a full-blown woodie.

She wore her best American Eagle clothes and her red bandanna that covered her hair pirate-style was kind of a disappointment since she has wicked gorgeous brown hair. Still, you don’t tell a chick what you don’t like about her looks. They tend to kind of tweak out about that. She walked toward me and put her arms around my neck. I’m 5’ 10” but Clarissa’s just an inch shorter than me. I put my arms around her waist and held her for a little longer than I suspect I should’ve but I didn’t care. So, this is why we dudes wear underwear, huh? She gave me a peck on the lips, maybe out of modesty or maybe just to tease me.

“Looks like we’re all here. Let’s get some moves in before we start the party, ‘kay?”

Some of the other kids were in costume, some weren’t. We all attacked the course and I did some pretty good grind rails and other tricks while riding fakie just to impress her. I deliberately had my cell phone turned off. Tonight was too fucking promising to have it ruined by irate parents.

“And don’t go having sex on my parents’ bed!” I heard Clarissa say over the speakers as she walked downstairs. She was getting all freaked out and shit as the party got more rowdy. I take back everything that I said about her not putting her ass on the line. If anything, she was risking even more than I was.

A few of our friends had taken some of the party and their skateboards outside and were trying to do tre flips and Ollies off the huge boulder to the right of their mansion. One of the kids got their older brother to buy us four cases of beer. Even considering that there were about two dozen of us, we were all 16 or 17, which meant that 96 beers could get us all hammered.

I’d heard older dudes tell horror stories about getting wasted then not being able to perform when Show Time came. I sure as Hell wasn’t going to let that happen to me. I stuck to Jolt Cola and could almost feel the two year-old Trojan in my wallet. I’d been saving it for when I get my cherry popped and the fucking thing had been there for so long my wallet has a terminal case of ring worm. I wasn’t even sure if it would be any good anymore.

Clarissa answered the doorbell to give out some candy to trick or treaters. This was all she was supposed to be doing while her parents were out. Her Dad was our Congressman and appearances had to be kept up. After getting their loot, the kids turned and laughed at something. Clarissa went out to investigate and saw that Ramon, another Emo boy, had landed on his face in a pile of leaves. I guess he tried to do a trick off the rock. Two other kids were standing at the top pointing and laughing at him. One was even taking a picture on his cell phone.

“What’re you guys, fucking idiots? Get in here before someone else sees you!”

The trick or treaters, who weren’t much younger or smaller than us, laughed at Ramon again. “Nice Ollie, asshole.”

“Nice costume,” Ramon shot back, “did your Mommy cut the eyeholes out of that sheet for you?”

The kid was dressed as a ghost and managed to free up his arm to give him the finger. Such dissing of their elders. Blame the parents, I say.

After our friends went back in, Clarissa and I loitered on the front porch. She slowly pivoted her hips this way and that way then smiled like she had a secret. She then took me by the hand and said, “Let’s go over here and talk for a bit.” I suddenly got whacked with a sick feeling that my little Trojan uniform for my little Trojan soldier would remain in its leather footlocker for at least another night.

Clarissa let go of my sweaty left hand long enough to climb the six foot high boulder then extended her arm to help me up. It was getting chilly and we were both wearing our hoods over our heads.

“OK, I get the ‘Emo’ part,” she began as she moved my bangs out of my eyes. “And I’m pretty sure the ‘91’ part is the year you were born, right?” I nodded. “What I don’t get is the middle part of your handle. Where’d ‘Ghost Boi’ come from?”

I was afraid someone would ask me about that. I wasn’t exactly subtle about it. Not only did I have like three dozen friends on my AIM contact list, I even customized my own avatar- Casper the Friendly Ghost with an Emo boy ‘do just like mine.

“No secret. You know how when the park is crowded and I can duck in and out from between people like I’m going through them? That’s all.”

“Umm,” Clarissa hummed while shaking her head and giving me a cynical look. “I don’t think so. Tell me the truth this time.”

I never wanted to tell anyone else I cared about, especially Clarissa.

“OK, promise you won’t laugh?” She solemnly nodded.

“Adam, I’d never laugh at anyone no matter what they confided in me.”

“Cross your heart and hope to…? OK, just cross your heart.” She did.

“You know that I have a sister, right? Well, we may be the only two kids in the family now but there was a third. Back when I was about ten, my Mom got pregnant. She went to full term then they had to induce her. Something was wrong. The baby was stillborn. Fucking cord got wrapped around its neck and nobody knew.”

“Oh my God, sweetie. I didn’t know.” Clarissa put her hand on my leg but I didn’t respond like I usually would.

“That’s not the whole story. About a year or so after my brother’s funeral, we visited his grave. My Dad and I stood around like a couple of idiots and didn’t know what to say while my mother and sister cried and pulled leaves off the marker. They left and I stayed behind for a few extra minutes. I would’ve felt guilty if I didn’t say something, ya know? I figured after everyone was gone something would come to me.

“So I turned around and there’s this baby or fetus standing right on the grave looking right at me. He was blue and his eyes and tongue were bugging out. It was like looking at some fucking ugly lawn statue or something. He didn’t move except for his eyes that kept following me. I was scared shitless. I didn’t know what to do or say. So I ran. I never went back there and never will.”

“Are you sure it couldn’t have been one of the headstones? Sometimes, people have statues made…”

“No, Clarissa, no,” I said, not realizing I was raising my voice. “It was standing on my brother’s grave. I couldn’t read the lettering on his headstone, anymore. I couldn’t see through him. He was fucking solid. Besides, how do you explain the umbilical cord?”

“Oh my God. He still had it around his neck?”

“Fuck yeah. So, that’s where I got the name ‘Ghost Boi.’ Ever since that day, that’s been my biggest fear.”

“Ghosts?”

“No, being one. Being dead and a ghost, being chained to earth, being forced to look at your loved ones and no one being able to see or hear you. That’s why sometimes I act up, act out, why I look the way I do. I figure even negative attention is better than no attention at all.”

“Adam, you shouldn’t get in trouble just to get noticed.”

“Oh, that’s good, coming from someone who called me a chicken for not ignoring my being grounded!”

“Adam? Remember our attempts?”

“Yeah!” I said like other people say “Duh!” “How could I forget that?” It was just over two years ago when Clarissa and I attempted suicide by cutting ourselves within two days of eachother. We met at the psych wing of the hospital and hit it off immediately. I was the one who got her into skateboarding after we got out. She agreed to do my hair after suggesting I go Emo. We’ve never been anything but friends since then but lately I was beginning to think that maybe we could be, like, girlfriend and boyfriend.

I wanted to get off the subject of our attempted suicides and my full body apparition experience. Looking down at what we were sitting on, I patted it with both hands and said,

“Ya know, a lot of stuff that we think of as big is just like a crumb or a pebble in the big-ass scheme of things. Take this boulder:

“When the Laurentide ice sheet started dragging its way down from northeastern Canada 100,000 years ago, it changed the landscape of the whole top half of North America. Fucking thing was like, two miles thick and when it scraped its way down to New England it created all our hills and mountains. And all hills and mountains are, Clarissa, are just wrinkles on the earth.

“This friggin’ boulder we’re sittin’ on may be twice the size of a Volkswagon and huge to us but it’s really just, I dunno, a forgotten pebble or even just a grain of sand kicked aside during this gi-normous geological event.

“Same could apply to any human life. Just when some of us start getting’ too full of ourselves, we should look at everything and put shit in perspective.”

Clarissa looked at me with admiration. “How do you know all this shit?”

“You know, sometimes when I pretend like I’m falling asleep in class, I’m really not. I’m listening even when I don’t want to.” Then I looked back up at her. “I can’t help but listen.”

Unfortunately, this was getting dangerously close to putting us back on the same subject I wanted to avoid: Seeing and hearing things that no living dude should ever have to see or hear and having no say in the matter. Lucky for me, a couple of trick or treaters walked up Clarissa’s walkway.

“You’re on,” I smiled.

“Yeah, I’d better get down there,” she said half sliding, half jumping off the boulder. “Otherwise, knowing those fucking idiots, those kids will get condoms and beer nuts thrown in their pumpkins.”

I stayed on top of the rock and turned my head to the right to see her cut across their path before they had the chance to ring the doorbell. Partly because of the downer of the subject matter and partly because of my own philosophical pep talk, I wasn’t even thinking of the relic of a condom in my wallet, much less whether I’d use it. It was the only time I can remember when I’d actually talked myself out of a hardon.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter Two

2009-02-07T09:06:00.000-08:00

Chapter Two
Halloween Night, 2009

First of all, a word about phones: I fucking hate the things. As far as I’m concerned, human technology peaked with fire and fulcrums. Everything else rolled downhill with the wheel. I’m sorry to be such a Luddite and a technological hermit but that’s just me. I’m a homicide detective, not an Amish farmer. So I guess I’m supposed to embrace technology. I just have a wild hair across my ass concerning anything and everything that wakes me up in the middle of the night. And that brings us back to my hatred of phones.

When the phone next to my bed rang for the first or maybe the fifteenth time, my hand shot out to answer it and I wound up launching the thing off its charger all the way to the bedroom window. Even in its new and slightly more desirable locale, the damned piece of plastic kept ringing with the insistence of Death itself.

“Hun, answer the phone. It may be the station,” my wife Beatrice mumbled as she pulled a pillow over the side of her head.

“Yeah, yeah.” It wouldn’t be the first time they called me when they shouldn’t have. It goes with the territory along with flat feet, bad coffee and all the other cop stereotypes that we find out, to our horror after we graduate from the academy, are actually true.

I stopped cursing the phone long enough to curse myself for punching the piece of shit to a place where I couldn’t even use it without having to get out of bed. I rolled off as the phone chirped and chirped like a loathsome, jeering electronic bird. I rested my hand against the window sill as I bent down to pick it up. Letting it ring one more time, I noted on the caller ID that it wasn’t the station but Lt. Rodriguez’s cell phone. I thumbed “Talk.”

“Roddy?”

“Ed, what the fuck took you so long to answer?”

“Uh, the Sandman? He sent me a really nice dream. You weren’t in it.” Before I could make another bad joke, I could hear sirens blaring in the background and I moved the phone an inch away from my ear. That last one sounded like it went right by my counterpart on the graveyard shift. “Roddy, what the hell’s going on?”

“Ed, you’d better get here at the Ritz Carlton on Mass Ave. It’s bad. Real bad.”

“Wh… what’re you talking about? What happened?” Another siren wailed in the distance. It sounded like they brought out the whole shooting match.

“Mass suicide, Ed. Look, I gotta go. We need all hands on deck on this one. You’re not gonna fucking believe it. While you’re getting dressed, turn on the TV.”

“What channel?” So this is how my day starts, getting briefed by a roving correspondent who makes twice the money I do with half the brains?

“Any channel.” I took an extra beat to let that register while I reached for yesterday’s wrinkled pants. “Hey, be careful how you pick up that body! Oh, shit… Look, I gotta go. Get your ass over here.” The line went dead.

I fumbled for the remote in the dark and turned on a news channel. Sure enough, there was the Ritz Carlton in the background, with bloody sheets covering presumably bloody bodies that were washed in red, white and blue lights like some horrid display of patriotism.

“Ed, what the hell are you watching? Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“In case you’re just tuning in, an enormous tragedy here in the hub of Boston…”

“Time to go to work,” I said after I listened to the breathless news report. I yanked my pants on as if my wife was married to someone else and her husband came home.

The entire perimeter of the five star hotel was a massive crime scene that was wrapped in a nice, cheerful yellow ribbon of “Do Not Cross: Crime Scene” tape. The uniforms had already cordoned off both ends of the block on which the Ritz Carlton rested and even I with my lights and gold shield flashing had a helluva time finding a place to park on account of all the fire engines, fire rescue trucks, cruisers and ambulances that choked the area. Just outside the perimeter there were news vans from what looked like every TV and radio station in New England. A couple of choppers slothfully circled overhead like rotund vultures.

Even the opportunistic jackals that run the TV news were downplaying the story. The sidewalk in front of the lobby was littered with bloody sheets when the Boston City PD ran out of body bags. I didn’t see nearly this many on the channel I’d turned on back home. I had a flashback to September 11th but suppressed that memory as I finally saw Lt. Emilio Rodriguez.

I slapped the gearshift into “park” and left the key in the ignition as my aching knees cursed me for getting out of the car so quickly.

“Roddy, what the fuck is going on? What happened?”

“How do you like your socialites: Over easy or scrambled?”

I wasn’t in any mood for sardonic police standup at crime scenes, a practice intended to chase death and keep it at arm’s length. I could see its time, place and function but Massachusetts Avenue tonight didn’t seem to be either.

“Roddy, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Far as we know, 53 dead and counting. Bunch of socialites were having a Halloween party up in the penthouse. Captains of industry, diplomats, celebrities, politicians past and present, you name it.” He gestured to a body bag awaiting a meat wagon. “Lemme introduce you to Senator Bill Dumont. Or rather, former Senator Dumont.”

“What?!” I thought that 16 years on the force and eight more in the Green Berets would’ve left me hopelessly jaded and incapable of surprise. I was wrong. “Our junior senator? That’s him?”

“Yeah, and that’s only the start of the guest list. 27 people we counted so far who jumped from the penthouse and some of the floors just below. Fire Department says there’s another 26 inside all deader than Adam and Eve.” I was going to ask Rodriguez how we knew there were 26 corpses awaiting us upstairs until I realized that Fire Rescue probably already checked for survivors.

“What’s the BFD doing in there?”

“Precautionary measure. What else can you think of that would make 53 people lose their fucking minds? I can think of three: fire and smoke, a gas leak or Bin Laden’s buddies screaming toward them in a 767. So far, it appears to be none of those. We’re awaiting word…” Then Roddy’s walkie talkie came to life.

“All clear. You can all come up. We found nothing to explain this.”

“Ever see a penthouse suite, Ed?” he asked with a horrid cheer as he tilted his heavily moussed head toward the building and began walking toward it.

I’ve long since gotten used to walking past weeping women at crime scenes but the bystanders at the perimeter and the hotel workers who were kept in the lobby were something else. I’ve never personally seen such horror on human faces before and, considering the carnage, I could fully appreciate them turning on the full waterworks. In order to see this look on anyone else, you would’ve had to have been either at Ground Zero or Oklahoma City because this was shaping up to be just as bad.

“…and when she passes, each one she passes goes… da dee dum…”

In spite of the situation, Roddy and I, as humans have done since the first Otis elevators, completely ignored eachother on the ride up. He’d since gotten the special passkey that allowed one to take the elevator all the way to the penthouse and I had no idea what to expect. Rather than ask him to brief me and maybe get a flippant response, I thought I’d just keep my mind clear and let it all hit me at once.

Ding!

What a ghoulishly cheerful sound, almost as much as the song playing on the speakers: “The Girl From Ipanema.” Add elevators and its music to my growing list of the most loathsome inventions ever conjured in the fevered mind of man. The doors finally opened after the elevator made a tiny last second adjustment. “You’ve seen the scrambled. Now meet the over easy,” said Roddy.

We walked to the door and I noticed right away that it was off one of its hinges. Being a private affair for the hoity toity, it was obviously locked but it was just as obvious that whoever went through it busted the lock. I also spotted a crack down the middle of the heavy wooden door.

The scene was pure Hieronymus Bosch if he’d illustrated the Inferno of Dante’s Divine Comedy. As stated, our people and even the ME’s office ran out of body bags downstairs and were obliged to ask the hotel for bed sheets to cover the bodies. But since we hadn’t had the chance to investigate up here until the scene was clear, we couldn’t even do that. It was the expressions on their faces that almost made me freeze in my tracks. Adding to the surreal element was the fact that every one of the victims was wearing a Halloween costume that ranged from a mere mask to full-blown witches, angels, devils and even, predictably, a ghost.

The last of the firemen were leaving, the first having gone down on other elevators. They were in full hazmat gear only with their helmets off. Handheld carbon monoxide detectors and other testing devices hung unalarmed from their hands. One guy we knew who was also a lieutenant stopped and nodded when he saw Roddy and me and said, “Roddy, Coffey, we tried not to disturb the scene. But we did a full sweep and found nothing. Obviously. Have fun.”

He put his helmet back on visor up as he shook his head.

I mentioned the faces. I know I’m beating around the bush. I’m just trying not to talk or think about it.

We’ve heard stories sometimes of people who were actually frightened to death and had their horrified expressions in their last moments of life frozen on their faces. I always wondered how morticians could smooth out the expressions into something less alarming by the time the relatives and beneficiaries came calling. I was wondering about that now, too.

Some died with their mouths and eyes wide open, some with their hands over their faces. Many of the bodies were equally contorted and I had a hard time recognizing even people I should’ve known. What the hell could make almost 50 people, including a US Senator, jump out of a high rise hotel when there wasn’t a fire or smoke or even a natural gas leak? 16 years on the job can prepare you for a lot but not something like this.

“It’s like fucking Jonestown,” Roddy said as he put on a fresh pair of latex gloves. He offered me a pair in case I didn’t have any. I did but I took them anyway.

“No, not like Jonestown,” I muttered as I pulled on the gloves. “At least with that, we know what killed those people.”

“I’d be willing to bet coronaries.”

“A mass coronary? I’ve heard of mass hysteria but that would be a first,” I said as I bent down to one particularly unfortunate dowager who looked even more horrified or terrified than most. I almost recognized her but couldn’t quite recall her name or place her face. “Plus, we have to ask ourselves what brought this on on such a wide scale.”

The CSI people were just coming in to the penthouse. It wasn’t until one of them remarked that the place felt cold that it registered with me, too. It did seem kind of chilly, as if Death itself was loitering around waiting to doggy-bag all the five star restaurant leftovers while no one was looking. Of course, the cold air could be attributable to it being October and the huge bay window being busted out when the rich, powerful and bored suddenly decided to go bungee jumping without the bungee cords.

The penthouse, as one could expect, was enormous. Fine china plates of food rested on antique furniture that looked more expensive than my house and car combined. More of them were on the floor, the products of years of culinary school and loving tender care strewn all over the floor and ground into the white plush carpet.

Then my eye caught a glint of light on one of the faces of the dead. I recognized this one. It was Senator Dumont’s wife, Grace. I wondered what could make a man jump out of a thirty story window while leaving his wife behind. The more I discovered, the less I knew. I hoped, absurdly, that our Chief of Detectives would authorize the OT that this case would require. Unfortunately, if you were murdered in the Greater Boston area a month before or after this, you’d have to wait until we could find your killer because this had Task Force written all over it.

I bent down for a better look at Mrs. Dumont’s body and found the source of the light that glinted off her face. It was ice crystals. I pivoted on my haunches and called over one of the CSI guys. “Ron, get over here. Take a shot of her face.”
The crime scene technician, a tall African American guy, walked over, squared the digital camera for a second and took a picture. “Let me have a copy. Email an attachment to my email at the station, ‘kay?” He coolly nodded as if this was actually a normal crime scene. Just another day at the office, only a bit more crowded.

I looked back down at Mrs. Dumont’s face. Her residual body heat had just melted the ice on her face and I looked around. The only ice to be had were ice cubes in drinks that were both still in glasses on over priced furniture or spilled on the floor. I guess someone could’ve crushed an ice cube in the panic but on this plush carpet? And, yeah, it was cold but not this cold.

I got up and my knees cursed me with four letter words and pops. I looked at the busted front door. “Roddy, didn’t you say that some people leaped through windows on the floors below us?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Well, that would kinda strongly suggest that someone or something was chasing them, doncha think?”

We trotted down to the next-to-last floor and walked against the cold draft until we found the broken window. A crime scene tech was already taking pictures of the scene and when he walked away we approached the window and looked out. There were two little lozenge-shaped figures below, one in a body bag, another with a sheet over them. Roddy and I both shook our heads, unable to fathom what could have been possibly going on in this building that would make jumping to your death preferable to staying inside. Some people said the same thing about the jumpers at the World Trade Center but in that case it was understandable. There was fire, smoke, fumes, and structural devastation. There was none of that here. Just some horrified expressions on over two dozen bodies and a few ice crystals that now no longer existed.

Something white and fluttering caught my eye and I noted that it was a feather. Where the hell did that come from? I was about to walk away then decided to bag and tag it just in case.

We heard a commotion going on upstairs so we rushed up the stairwell and back into the penthouse. Ron, the unimpressed CSI guy, was now very impressed with something. He was yelling into his walkie talkie, “I repeat, get EMS back up here. We’ve got a live one!”

Chapter Three.

The Bone Bridge: Chapter One

2009-02-07T08:59:00.000-08:00

Chapter One
Abu Ghraib Prison, west of Baghdad, Iraq

The black semi backed into Hell’s loading dock with loud metronomic beeps. A brief impact then arms of dust reached up and dropped when ten dragons’ snorts engaged hydraulic brake drums. Finally, the diesel engine was killed. Two men emerged from either side of the black cab and collided with the earth.

One was in his late 50’s although even his closest intimates, if he could be said to have any, didn’t know his true age. Although he had ridden shotgun, he was obviously the one in charge. Despite his relatively advanced age, he was stocky in a power lifter type of way, with not much if any of his muscle mass turning to flab.

His platinum white hair almost gleamed under the merciless Iraqi sun like thousands of needles standing at attention. Time seemed to slow around him, he commanded so much notice. Moving with the grace and confidence of a big cat, he gave the armored SUVs and the occupants within them a glacial look and spat in their general direction, creating a moving ring of road silt. He seemed to actually resent the mercenary security detail.

The driver appeared to be roughly half his age and his handsome but dour face suggested military or paramilitary experience spanning his entire life. He immediately went to work rolling up the rear of the trailer and exposing the ton and a half of high tech equipment within. Or rather, they weren’t exposed at all but covered with canvas tarps.

The American Army colonel watching them from the loading dock looked impressed with their military dispatch and seeming contempt for the soldiers of fortune.

Presently, the rest of the team showed up in a pair of equally black Humvees. Three men were in one, a man and a woman in the other. They, too, seemed businesslike to the point of brusqueness and, unlike their leader, completely ignored their mercenary bodyguards. The insurgents and death squads must’ve taken the day off because the trip from the airport was completely free of incident.

While the personnel in the newly-arrived Humvees set to work unstrapping the gear, the men in the semi’s cab hoisted themselves onto the loading dock and shook hands with the colonel.

“Oh, if only these walls could scream,” the old secret policeman thought.

Just walking into the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, and as a civilian, at that, was no mean feat. But getting access to restricted and classified locales was rarely if ever a problem for Hans Dietrich.

The ramrod-straight American Army liaison colonel who walked down the deserted walkway beside him spoke little but informatively, which he appreciated. While the always reserved German didn’t actually like him (a distinction given to one, perhaps two people), Dietrich began developing respect for this man. Hair buzz-cut to razor-sharp perfection, with a no nonsense demeanor, this military man’s claim was very much at odds with his stubborn pragmatism and skepticism. He had what Dietrich guessed was an Appalachian accent, perhaps Texan.

“As I’m sure you know, Mr. Dietrich, we handed over control of this facility back to the Iraqi government in July of ’06.”

Dietrich smiled to himself and silently asked, “If that’s the case, then why did we have to get permission from the Pentagon for this investigation?”
“But almost from the start we began getting reports from the Iraqi guards and even the detainees. The videotape you’re about to see is the only documented evidence that would seem to support those claims.”

The prison, which the American colonel never referred to as a prison but “this facility”, was cleared of both inmates and guards well in advance of Dietrich’s visit. Arabs in general, Iraqis being no exception, are exceptionally skittish about the paranormal and the story went that they abandoned the prison, vowing not to come back until it was rid of a certain entity.

Their footfalls made hollow echoes as they walked down the aisles. Of course, Dietrich had seen the pictures of prisoners getting tortured and made to form human pyramids at the behest of American idiots who were otherwise themselves powerless in their lives. He tried to imagine the screams and moans of agony, pain and despair and smiled. It would have brought him back to the good old days in East Berlin and Lichtenberg when he was with the East German Stasi. In fact, every time Dietrich and his crew were invited into a prison, he tried to imagine what it was like in its heyday.

Dietrich looked at his technical manager Günter to his left. Since he was in charge of setting up the equipment, it only made sense that he would attend the pre-investigation tour, or what everyone on the team would call recon. The three men arrived at a door that the colonel, whose name plate on his camouflage shirt read “Waterston”, had to unlock with a key.

“Rather than turn on the gas jets, I’ll just play the tape and let you judge for yourselves.” He turned on a light. “I’m what you’d call a die hard skeptic. I need hard, concrete evidence before believing in stuff like this and even after that, I want to see more before I’ll wrap my arms and lips around it. But this takes the fucking cake, pardon my French.”

Dietrich, despite his growing respect for this man, was also developing impatience. He’d uttered more words in the last 60 seconds than he had since meeting Günter and him at the gates a half hour ago. But considering the alleged content on this surveillance tape, perhaps he could be excused for his relative prolixity.

Col. Waterston turned on a TV then a VCR. The security video was on an antiquated VHS tape that promptly disappeared before the officer’s hand.

“It’s been fast-forwarded to just before this guard’s experience. I’m sorry there’s no sound but at least it’s in color and the picture quality’s OK.” Dietrich nodded with hardly concealed impatience and irritation as he and Günter closely regarded the tape.

An Iraqi guard was making his rounds in a hallway at the prison, looking inside each cell as he went by. Almost immediately, a figure in an orange jumpsuit slowly approached him from the left and the guard, understandably, was quite alarmed. When the figure in orange reached out to him, seemingly grabbing him by the throat, the guard took a step back with some difficulty and aimed his rifle at him, briefly pointing the barrel down. He was obviously mistaking him for an escaped prisoner and was telling him to get on the ground. When the orange-clad man, who also appeared to be of Arab descent, didn’t obey, the guard fired a shot at him to no discernible effect.

Instead, the figure turned around and walked into a cell. The most remarkable thing about that was the door was closed. The guard rubbed his throat and followed the figure, having to unlock the door. He entered it only to reemerge moments later, looking both scared out of his wits and perplexed. It was everything the American and Iraqi military said it was. He then ran out of camera range, obviously to tell his colleagues and to ask what the fuck was going on.

“Now, obviously, this hasn’t been tampered with. We have a complete chain of custody documenting who’s even so much as touched this tape. Now, you were briefed in our first encrypted email. The Iraqis ain’t setting foot in this facility again until they get proof that this guy’s gone. And it is extremely important to both us and the Iraqi government that this place is up and running again.”

“So, who’s the figure in orange?” It was the only thing Günter would ever say during the tour, which was typical of him.

“Well,” Col. Waterston said before exhaling and rubbing the back of his neck as he sat on the edge of the desk. “That’s the perplexing thing. We’ve blown up still pictures that we took of the video and we’re pretty sure it’s Mursi al Islamiyah. Very bad man, al Qaeda operative.” He fractionally leaned toward Dietrich and Günter and said almost under his breath even though the prison was supposed to be deserted. “Mursi al Islamiyah died in our custody in late ’03 but you didn’t hear that from me. That tape was shot just last year in ’08. To be honest with you, Islamiyah was probably the only Class of 2001 al Qaeda terrorist we ever had here. But you didn’t hear that from me, either.”

“And the inmates had seen him, too?”

“Yes, sir. At least half a dozen inmates and three, maybe four guards in, I believe, five other separate times.” He slid off the edge of the desk. “Your reputation precedes you, gentlemen. If you sweep this area and get rid of this so-called ghost, then the Iraqi government will believe you and we can get this facility hummin’ again.”

Dietrich had a well-deserved reputation as a paranormal investigator, an actual ghost hunter in every sense of the word. Not some guy with a few high tech instruments who does an 8 hour investigation then does a reveal for the client a couple of days later and going back to his life. Dietrich was someone who actively stalked and captured ghosts. The client never really knew how he did it and certainly not why. But all anyone knew was that if they had a noxious entity living in their house that then suddenly vanished after a Dietrich investigation, all they’d feel was gratitude. No one ever asked what was done with the spirits nor seemed to care.

Sure, there were reveals after an evidence review. EVPs (if any), still photos taken with full spectrum cameras, video footage, any evidence of supernatural activity was dutifully shown to the client along with the usual assurances of having their home, job or whatever rid of its paranormal pestilence. Of course, Hans Dietrich was just a paranormal investigator like Mata Hari was just a dancer.

“You might wanna focus a camera in that holding cell that figure walked into," the colonel concluded. "That’s the very same cell where Islamiyah died in December of ’03.” Dietrich nodded as if to say that he was way ahead of him. Which, of course, he was. It was obvious to all but the colonel that they were waiting for him to leave so they could clear out the truck.

“Just out of curiosity”, Waterston asked, “when you get rid of a ghost, what do you do with it? I mean, it’s like what do morticians do with the blood they drain out of people but no one bothers to ask them. So, what do you do with them critters that you… suck out?”

“I could tell you, Colonel,” Dietrich replied, “but then I’d have to kill you.” The colonel laughed until he realized that Dietrich was returning neither his laugh nor his smile.

“Is that everything?” Dietrich asked Günter on the prison’s loading dock. His equipment manager nodded curtly. Their gear was so voluminous it had to be transported on a semi with virtually every inch at a premium. The semi, in turn, had been transported to Iraq on an Air Force C5A along with a couple of hundred scared shitless troops about to enter their first tour of duty. Obviously, this also required approval from the Pentagon. The Blackwater mercs? Courtesy of the US State Dept., their best employer.

Iraqi sovereignty my Aryan ass.

Dietrich picked up the final laptop case and again regarded the retinue of Blackwater mercs that had escorted the 18 wheeler and were now patrolling the immediate perimeter of the prison. Not only did Dietrich despise mercenaries and their ability to show up and even unseat small governments, these bad-ass American has-beens and wannabes were redundant once they crossed the main gate. Besides if, as Dietrich had hoped, all Hell broke loose during the “investigation”, they’d be twice as worthless. They weren’t exactly trained for shit like this. He turned his head and squinted at the sunset and walked back into the prison.

If there was one comedian on the whole team, it would have to be Breck, the only American. He was professional enough to play it straight during the hunts but he would never fail to come up with at least one irreverent observation either before or after lights out.

“Hey, Dietrich,” he said with a manic gleam in his eyes, “wouldn’t it be cool if we bagged not only this sand nigger but his 72 virgins, too?” Dietrich gave him a withering look but Breck, true to form, didn’t take the hint and chuckled at his own joke as he unspooled coaxial cable.

The largest, most sensitive and expensive equipment would be unloaded only by Dietrich himself and Günter. The most prominent of these was what was colloquially known as “the movable hole.” It was so massive and heavy that a refurbished Humvee was built around it. It was essentially a 6 x 6 black box and to simply look at it no one could possibly divine its true purpose let alone how it worked. It was always the last piece of equipment used during a successful investigation.

It was the last stop for a lot of the ghosts that were captured by Dietrich’s crew. The theory was that paranormal entities such as ghosts or spirits had unique energy signatures just as living people’s fingerprints, retina and DNA distinguishes them. When an entity manifested, the team was able to get a quick fix on not just its location but also its electromagnetic signature.

The sardonically-named “Ghostbusters”, or the handheld devices powered by drain-resistant battery back packs that were actually a reference to dustbuster vacuum cleaners rather than the comical movies starring Bill Murray, would essentially arrest a spirit if they were within the unit’s limited range. Once put into an electromagnetic tractor beam, for want of a better phrase, Günter would then hustle to wherever the capture was made and put the entity on ice.

As well as the usual ghost hunting equipment such as DV and IR cams, high 8’s, audio recorders, K2 meters, EMF detectors and thermal cams, Dietrich’s team went considerably beyond that technological curve. For instance, frustrated with EVPs, disembodied voices not heard by the naked ear until a digital audio playback, Dietrich used a headset connected to a 360° mic that automatically looped back to him what had just been captured on the recording device. The only drawback was that there was a delay of two seconds and in the world of paranormal investigation, that’s all the time in the world for a spirit to disappear.

Understandably, not a lot of the ghosts they’d pursued over the years wanted to be captured. Spirits, as the theory goes, tend to stick close to a certain environment to which they’re emotionally attached. To rip them out of a favored environment is quite a coup in itself and a lot of them had fought like Great Whites.

The reason for this was because Hans Dietrich didn’t go after the nice ones, which was why he’d specialized in prisons and insane asylums. Abu Ghraib was both, the worst of both worlds.

When he was satisfied that all unauthorized personnel were out of the prison and his team and equipment were in position, he bent the walkie talkie’s stalk mic toward his mouth and said over a scrambled frequency, “Kill the lights.”

The capacitor in the night vision goggles whined briefly and Abu Ghraib turned from pitch black to pea soup green. Dietrich panned left and right, alternately switching the experimental all-vision unit from normal night vision to UV, IR and finally to full spectrum mode.

Gert Hesse, the woman beside him and the team’s only psychic, didn’t rely so much on scientific gear although she used it to validate her perceptions. To Dietrich, she looked eerily defined in a full light spectrum in a surreally-bleak type of way reminiscent of the cinematography of 300 or Sin City.

His earpiece relayed a metallic sound. Since playback was in stereo, he as with the whole crew was able to home in on its source. When he got to the end of a corridor, he turned left and saw Breck.

“Sorry, Hans. I hit an open gate with my wand. My bad.” Dietrich looked at the “ghostbuster” wand in his hand then up at him.

Good thing he was wearing night vision goggles, otherwise Dietrich would’ve killed him with the look he gave him. Gert cocked her head at him in annoyance before they moved on.

“Shithead,” she said in German. Dietrich permitted himself a rare smile as he continued his EMF and audio sweep.

One hour passed. Then two, then three. Not a single electromagnetic spike, an unnatural cold spot or a disembodied syllable. Dietrich decided that now would be a good time to step on some invisible toes.

“Time for Plan P,” he said into the two way’s stalk mic, “and I think the comedian should take point on this.”

“You got it, boss,” Breck responded.

Plan P was actually the team’s Plan B, the “P” standing for provocation.

Roughly 75-80% of their investigations would turn up nothing. They weren’t vaudeville performers appearing at regular times. Sometimes, ghosts would take the night off. The help enhance the odds of making contact, some paranormal investigators wouldn’t be above provocation. Deliberately taunting or insulting an entity would at times be efficacious enough to elicit a response.

Since Breck was the self-appointed smartass of the team, it usually fell to him to do the taunting. He was also uniquely suited to doing this tonight because he was the only one who spoke Arabic. And it only made sense to speak the indigenous language when hunting spirits. After all, why should they understand you just because you’re speaking in English or is there a Charles Berlitz course that one must pass before continuing to the afterlife? So it wasn’t unusual to get EVP’s, or electronic voice phenomena, spoken in the language of an investigation’s host country.

Breck cleared his throat, annoying Dietrich and probably the other two team members. He then began speaking in Arabic while the team continued their sweeps, even though no one but Breck knew what he was saying.

“Hey,” he said in Arabic, “I saw a picture of your guy Mohammed on the way over here. He had a fucking bomb for a turban. I’d say that’s about right. Bombing shit is all you assholes know how to do.” Even alluding to a picture of Mohammed, much less actually drawing one, was an offense in the fundamentalist Muslim world that was often punishable by death. Representations of the Prophet were strictly forbidden and Breck obviously knew this.

He continued sweeping the area. Nobody on the team heard anything yet so Breck continued the taunting.

“Gotta hand it to you pricks, though. Pretty clever talking other people into blowing themselves up so you don’t have to. And promising them 72 virgins if they do your bidding? Sheer genius, Islamiyah.”

Then by way of the two second delay, Hans and the team members heard something on the playback. It was a hissing and after listening for a second, he was able to triangulate on its location. It was headed straight for Breck. Instead of warning his man over the two-way, he silently motioned to Gert to get to Breck’s position and for Günter to head for the Humvee just in case.

Hans headed to the same destination albeit from a different approach. The idea was to come up behind Breck while Gert would approach him from the other end of the corridor. The wands had a powerful pull and ghosts trying to escape had a very difficult time doing so if they were surrounded. The various instrumentation they all carried with them, including temp gauges, EMF detectors and so forth, warned them of a severe drop in temperature and a massive buildup of energy. Breck had the same resources and if he was caught unawares, it was his bad.

He continued the taunting while Dietrich got sight of him about 50 yards down the hallway. Breck’s voice was an echo on account of the playback coming two seconds after his live voice, giving the session an unreal quality. That plus the natural echo of the empty hallways multiplied his voice several times over.

“What’s the matter, chicken shit? Cat got your…” Through the night vision goggles, Dietrich could see the American straighten up and his sneering voice was immediately reduced to a gurgle. His wand clattered to the ground as he levitated and it would be up to Hans and the rest of his team to use the EM tractor beam on their own to capture the entity. Hans began running to the scene and called out on his two-way, “We’re in corridor C! Hurry before he gets away!”

Dietrich was anxious to see what his man had trapped so he approached him from an oblique angle. There in the all spectrum mode of the goggles he could see a bright white figure literally holding up Breck above ground with one hand. It was al Islamiyah. The ghost quickly turned to Dietrich and gave him a hateful glare. “Dogs,” was all the ex policeman heard two seconds after seeing his bearded mouth move and he ripped out Breck’s larynx while he was still in midair.

“Get him!” Dietrich yelled as Gert came running down the opposite side of the hall. Both wands went to work at once. “Bring in the hole!” he yelled to his other man in the Humvee and Dietrich could hear the monstrosity rumble to life and speed its way to their location.

It’s a known fact that ghosts, despite having no nervous system, can feel pain much the same way that amputees can still feel pain and other sensations in missing limbs and extremities. Dietrich never ceased to be fascinated by the common reaction that entities had when they were hit by the tractor beams of their wands. He also never ceased to derive enjoyment from observing the looks on their faces and their contortions. He didn’t know why the beam hurt them. It was just enough for him to know they did.

“Günter! Open the portal!” he yelled. A static charge and irritating hum filled the air while the terrorist’s diaphanous form writhed about five feet in midair. The beams, while invisible to the naked eye, emitted a bright green light when viewed in all spectrum mode and Dietrich was always struck by its luminescent muscularity. Eventually he moved beside Gert, looking very much like a man who’d just snagged a blue marlin off the coast of Florida. Some of the more powerful ghosts were actually able to rip free of one tractor beam while caught in the limits of its range. From point blank, there was no way even this monster could escape two.

“Purge setting!” he said and with the flip of a switch on the units they simultaneously catapulted Mursi al Islamiyah into the movable hole. Günter, as always, closed the portal immediately, a feat that always required split second timing.

“That is one pissed off ghost,” Gert said in German. She dispassionately looked down at Breck’s body. By this time, he’d completely bled out and blackish blood spread throughout the hallway.

“Yes,” Dietrich said to the corpse. “Good job, Breck. Sorry you won’t get your bonus for this one,” he said in English.

Chapter Two.