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.”
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
The Bone Bridge- Chapter 24
“What’s A.D.E.P.T.?” I asked either Laura or Blood. For the first time, they said the name of their super duper, triple secret spy outfit.
“It stands for Allied Defense of Existing or Emerging Paranormal Technologies,” Blood said as he drove into the night.
“So wouldn’t that be A.D.E.E.P.T.?” Laura gave me the stink eye.
“‘Existing’ and ‘Emerging’ are interchangeable or optional. The point is, we’re in existence partly to prevent certain research and development like our grandfather’s work from being perverted and exploited.”
“And our job isn’t just chasing ghosts around and keeping them from being exploited,” Blood added. “It’s also our job to keep psychic research from falling into the wrong hands.”
“Ghosts and psychics,” I said under my breath. “Man, you guys must have some real interesting office Christmas parties.”
“Are you sure you didn’t recognize any of the ghosts at the Ritz Carlton, Adam?” Blood had already grilled me twice with that question and I was already beginning to regret using that as a decoy tactic to divert attention away from Coffey. I think that Blood was hoping some of them were from that massive clusterfuck on Halloween and that some of them told me what went down that night.
“No, dude, I already told you. I never saw ‘em in my life. Most of the ones I see are strangers, to begin with.”
“I was wondering if they were Congressman and Mrs. Feingold or anyone else from the party. A lot of ‘em were famous people. I was hopin’ you’d recognize some of them or if they spoke to you about what happened.”
“Naw, sorry, dude. Nuthin’ like that. They were, like, just random.”
I looked over at Laura and she looked back at me real sketchy, like she didn’t know whether or not I was bullshitting her. Remember, I said earlier that it’s almost impossible for even an accomplished liar like me to fool her.
I fought wicked hard not to look out the rear windshield to see if Coffey was following us. But somehow I knew he was.
In nine years as a patrol cop and seven as a homicide detective, I don’t recall ever having to tail someone. At the academy, they taught us pursuit and evasive maneuvers but not how to tail a suspect during a low speed pursuit. Homicide dicks generally don’t work undercover like the Serpico wannabes in Narcotics so discretion’s not among our strong suits. And I’m definitely no exception.
Lucky for me this Oliver Blood character rented just about the most conspicuous fucking SUV in the Western Hemisphere. I was pretty sure he’d arrived alone at Logan airport but by renting a Lincoln Navigator, it was almost as if he was planning on taking back with him the entire defensive squad of the New England Patriots. Earlier on, I ran the plates through the RMV and got it confirmed that it was rented to an Oliver R. Blood at the Hertz rental counter at Logan three days ago and paid for with a government-issued credit card.
That’s right. The arrogant prick actually used his own name right down to the middle initial. What intelligence agency head does that and how many others would be this hands-on about it?
Once they boarded their plane, however, I had no fucking idea how I was going to get on without being seen by Blood or the Moss girl, especially if Blood took a smaller private jet. I had even less of a plan for sneaking into their headquarters even if I could follow them that far.
“Goddamned 30 cylinder piece of shit. Passes everything but a Goddamned gas station,” Oliver Blood muttered as he flicked the plexiglassed fuel gauge with his thick index finger even though it was an LED readout.
They still had miles to go but Blood just noticed the computer telling him he had only about thirty miles of gas at their present rate of consumption. It was half-full when he rented it therefore he had to return it half-full. The new DNI’s bean counters and hatchet men were all over him every month as it was for his agency’s discretionary spending.
“We have to get gas?” Laura asked as she leaned toward the front seat.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t planning on stopping. ‘S my fault. I shoulda checked the damned gauge.”
Blood drove deeper into the night until he lowered his head and noted an exit sign indicating gas stations, restaurants and a motel. Within minutes he turned off the highway.
The Lincoln got in the breakdown lane and the right directional began blinking just shy of the exit. I thought I’d been made, even though I stayed 2-3 car lengths behind. They may’ve been trying to shake me off it could’ve simply been that Blood had to get gas before returning the rental. Then again, anyone who’s ever seen a bad cop or spy movie knows the best way to flush out a tail is to take an exit or make a long series of turns in secluded areas. More often than not, it’ll remove what few cars that remain between you and your tail. Luckily, a guy in a fat-ass Ford S-series pickup ahead of me kept himself between Blood’s Navigator and me. Plus, the sign back on the highway promised gas and other services.
The whole time I was with my sister and Blood, I tried to scope out things in the rear view mirror. But when Blood began turning on that exit ramp, whoever was behind us couldn’t be seen because we were turning. So I had no clue if Coffey was behind us.
During the trip from the hotel I started freaking myself out over what Laura and her boss both told me and didn’t tell me. They hadn’t come out to tell me about the adepts, the others like me that they wanted me to meet. That shit I had to find out with the playback from the digital audio recorder that Ramon got me for my birthday.
That alone put me in a really crappy position. I knew I couldn’t trust Blood as far as I could throw my high school. What made me feel lower than mole shit was not being able to trust my own sister. We might not always have been cool to each other growing up but I never had any reason to distrust her. With this new bullshit since the accident, since Clarissa died, all that’s changed.
Hell, I wasn’t even 100% sure if I could trust that Coffey cop. For all I knew, maybe he was just using me to solve his own case but I never really believed that. If I didn’t actually trust him with my own life, I felt like I could, you know? It was easy for even a kid like me to see that he was a Dad, probably someone with a kid my own age. And he would look at me sometimes like my real Dad does during cool moments when we aren’t wising off to each other.
All the same, while I trusted Coffey more than my own sister, it was pretty obvious that they weren’t giving me the full four one one. Even though I asked both Coffey and Laura how those people got croaked on Halloween, they either told me that I didn’t wanna know and that it was best I didn’t or that that some of those hoity toity types jumped.
Well, yeah. A lot of them got squashed on the sidewalk. The news kept telling me that but what no one was telling me was why they jumped. I mean, it’s not every day that a bunch of rich fucks decide to go urban sky diving without parachutes.
But considering that Laura’s secret agent pals took my parents and me into protective custody and what had just gone down at the Christiansons’ house, it obviously wasn’t anything routine like a serial killer or terrorists.
Basically, the so-called grownups were keeping little Adam in the dark and that fucking pissed me off to no end. I’m 18, now, and I’ll be out of high school in 6 months. I think I’m old enough to handle the truth. After all, I saw the ghost of a Nazi doctor off two people and their dead daughters, to boot. How do I know that he wasn’t involved in the Halloween massacre?
Blood pulled into a Mobil station and got out when he realized that no gas attendant was coming out. He slipped a card in and out of the pump and started gassing up. I took a chance and looked at both the rear and side view mirrors and saw Coffey stop next to a car vacuum machine about 50 feet behind us.
“Laura, can you get me an ice coffee? I don’t have any money.”
“Can’t you wait? We’ll be on the plane soon. It’s a private jet.”
“C’mon, Sis, that’ll take hours. ‘Sides, I gotta pee like a racehorse. And we’re here, already.”
She looked at the store on our right then at Oliver, who still hadn’t even pumped five bucks.
“My boss gave me explicit instructions not to leave you alone for even a nanosecond.”
“He’s fuckin’ right out there! ‘Sides, where am I gonna run to? You guys are all I got for protection and transportation.” For extra credit, I even squirmed and grabbed my crotch. “Laura, don’t you remember what happened about six years ago when Mom and Dad took us to the Cape?”
Her eyes got wide then narrowed as she grimly nodded her head. I was still 12 and couldn’t hold it in. By the time we got to the Sagamore Bridge, I’d started peeing in my pants. Dad couldn’t just stop on the bridge and the only container we had was the empty liter Pepsi bottle that caused the crisis. In a panic, Laura reached down and threw the bottle at me and looked real hard out her window as I began peeing into it.
But the worst part was when I forgot to vent the opening and the backed-up air pressure made my piss spray out all over the car. Poor Laura, Dad and I got a golden shower and I even got the back of my Mom’s hair.
I raised my eyebrows at Laura and she looked around the interior of this nice, clean SUV then back out at Oliver.
“Are you sure you can’t wait to get back to Logan?”
“You really haven’t learned much from the government about water and air displacement, have you?” I grabbed my dick again.
“Alright, alright. Just stop touching yourself down there.” She opened the passenger side back door and said, “You know I love you, Bro, but there’s always going to be a grossness factor with you.”
“Thank you, Big Sister,” I said as I slid out.
“Oliver, Adam’s gotta use the bathroom.” We heard the nozzle stop and Blood came out from behind the SUV.
“Are you gonna go in with him?” he asked in a real smart-assed way.
“Well, obviously not, sir.”
“Then you’ll wait until I’m done here,” he said to us. I looked at Laura as I did a little Irish jig. Man, even taking a piss with these guys is like planning fucking D Day. Now I know what Congressman Feingold meant when he told me one time that our government moves more slowly than molasses running uphill in January.
“Uh, sir, trust me. That’s not a good idea. My kid brother’s got a bladder the size of a ping pong ball.” I nodded at Blood for emphasis.
“Well, I can’t go in with him. I gotta do this. Unless you want to trade,” he said gesturing at the pump.
“Shit, I think I just spritzed a little in my pants…”
“Damnit, hurry up!” I could tell his patience with me was wearing thin. Coffey, like I already said, was a Dad. Blood? No way. Never was, never will be. He doesn’t have the blood pressure for it, pardon the pun.
“Wait here. I’ll get the key.”
“No, it’s open. I just saw someone walk out and they didn’t have a key.” I started jogging to the bathroom.
“You better be out before me. I don’t care how full your bladder is.”
I got to the bathroom door just as Laura went into the store then at Blood. He peeked out from behind the Navigator and I stepped into the bathroom for just a minute. Then I stuck my head out and looked right at Coffey then at the Lincoln. Blood went back to what he was doing. I took a step toward Coffey’s car then remembered leaving something in the back seat of the SUV. And no fuckin’ way was I taking off without it.
“It stands for Allied Defense of Existing or Emerging Paranormal Technologies,” Blood said as he drove into the night.
“So wouldn’t that be A.D.E.E.P.T.?” Laura gave me the stink eye.
“‘Existing’ and ‘Emerging’ are interchangeable or optional. The point is, we’re in existence partly to prevent certain research and development like our grandfather’s work from being perverted and exploited.”
“And our job isn’t just chasing ghosts around and keeping them from being exploited,” Blood added. “It’s also our job to keep psychic research from falling into the wrong hands.”
“Ghosts and psychics,” I said under my breath. “Man, you guys must have some real interesting office Christmas parties.”
“Are you sure you didn’t recognize any of the ghosts at the Ritz Carlton, Adam?” Blood had already grilled me twice with that question and I was already beginning to regret using that as a decoy tactic to divert attention away from Coffey. I think that Blood was hoping some of them were from that massive clusterfuck on Halloween and that some of them told me what went down that night.
“No, dude, I already told you. I never saw ‘em in my life. Most of the ones I see are strangers, to begin with.”
“I was wondering if they were Congressman and Mrs. Feingold or anyone else from the party. A lot of ‘em were famous people. I was hopin’ you’d recognize some of them or if they spoke to you about what happened.”
“Naw, sorry, dude. Nuthin’ like that. They were, like, just random.”
I looked over at Laura and she looked back at me real sketchy, like she didn’t know whether or not I was bullshitting her. Remember, I said earlier that it’s almost impossible for even an accomplished liar like me to fool her.
I fought wicked hard not to look out the rear windshield to see if Coffey was following us. But somehow I knew he was.
In nine years as a patrol cop and seven as a homicide detective, I don’t recall ever having to tail someone. At the academy, they taught us pursuit and evasive maneuvers but not how to tail a suspect during a low speed pursuit. Homicide dicks generally don’t work undercover like the Serpico wannabes in Narcotics so discretion’s not among our strong suits. And I’m definitely no exception.
Lucky for me this Oliver Blood character rented just about the most conspicuous fucking SUV in the Western Hemisphere. I was pretty sure he’d arrived alone at Logan airport but by renting a Lincoln Navigator, it was almost as if he was planning on taking back with him the entire defensive squad of the New England Patriots. Earlier on, I ran the plates through the RMV and got it confirmed that it was rented to an Oliver R. Blood at the Hertz rental counter at Logan three days ago and paid for with a government-issued credit card.
That’s right. The arrogant prick actually used his own name right down to the middle initial. What intelligence agency head does that and how many others would be this hands-on about it?
Once they boarded their plane, however, I had no fucking idea how I was going to get on without being seen by Blood or the Moss girl, especially if Blood took a smaller private jet. I had even less of a plan for sneaking into their headquarters even if I could follow them that far.
“Goddamned 30 cylinder piece of shit. Passes everything but a Goddamned gas station,” Oliver Blood muttered as he flicked the plexiglassed fuel gauge with his thick index finger even though it was an LED readout.
They still had miles to go but Blood just noticed the computer telling him he had only about thirty miles of gas at their present rate of consumption. It was half-full when he rented it therefore he had to return it half-full. The new DNI’s bean counters and hatchet men were all over him every month as it was for his agency’s discretionary spending.
“We have to get gas?” Laura asked as she leaned toward the front seat.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t planning on stopping. ‘S my fault. I shoulda checked the damned gauge.”
Blood drove deeper into the night until he lowered his head and noted an exit sign indicating gas stations, restaurants and a motel. Within minutes he turned off the highway.
The Lincoln got in the breakdown lane and the right directional began blinking just shy of the exit. I thought I’d been made, even though I stayed 2-3 car lengths behind. They may’ve been trying to shake me off it could’ve simply been that Blood had to get gas before returning the rental. Then again, anyone who’s ever seen a bad cop or spy movie knows the best way to flush out a tail is to take an exit or make a long series of turns in secluded areas. More often than not, it’ll remove what few cars that remain between you and your tail. Luckily, a guy in a fat-ass Ford S-series pickup ahead of me kept himself between Blood’s Navigator and me. Plus, the sign back on the highway promised gas and other services.
The whole time I was with my sister and Blood, I tried to scope out things in the rear view mirror. But when Blood began turning on that exit ramp, whoever was behind us couldn’t be seen because we were turning. So I had no clue if Coffey was behind us.
During the trip from the hotel I started freaking myself out over what Laura and her boss both told me and didn’t tell me. They hadn’t come out to tell me about the adepts, the others like me that they wanted me to meet. That shit I had to find out with the playback from the digital audio recorder that Ramon got me for my birthday.
That alone put me in a really crappy position. I knew I couldn’t trust Blood as far as I could throw my high school. What made me feel lower than mole shit was not being able to trust my own sister. We might not always have been cool to each other growing up but I never had any reason to distrust her. With this new bullshit since the accident, since Clarissa died, all that’s changed.
Hell, I wasn’t even 100% sure if I could trust that Coffey cop. For all I knew, maybe he was just using me to solve his own case but I never really believed that. If I didn’t actually trust him with my own life, I felt like I could, you know? It was easy for even a kid like me to see that he was a Dad, probably someone with a kid my own age. And he would look at me sometimes like my real Dad does during cool moments when we aren’t wising off to each other.
All the same, while I trusted Coffey more than my own sister, it was pretty obvious that they weren’t giving me the full four one one. Even though I asked both Coffey and Laura how those people got croaked on Halloween, they either told me that I didn’t wanna know and that it was best I didn’t or that that some of those hoity toity types jumped.
Well, yeah. A lot of them got squashed on the sidewalk. The news kept telling me that but what no one was telling me was why they jumped. I mean, it’s not every day that a bunch of rich fucks decide to go urban sky diving without parachutes.
But considering that Laura’s secret agent pals took my parents and me into protective custody and what had just gone down at the Christiansons’ house, it obviously wasn’t anything routine like a serial killer or terrorists.
Basically, the so-called grownups were keeping little Adam in the dark and that fucking pissed me off to no end. I’m 18, now, and I’ll be out of high school in 6 months. I think I’m old enough to handle the truth. After all, I saw the ghost of a Nazi doctor off two people and their dead daughters, to boot. How do I know that he wasn’t involved in the Halloween massacre?
Blood pulled into a Mobil station and got out when he realized that no gas attendant was coming out. He slipped a card in and out of the pump and started gassing up. I took a chance and looked at both the rear and side view mirrors and saw Coffey stop next to a car vacuum machine about 50 feet behind us.
“Laura, can you get me an ice coffee? I don’t have any money.”
“Can’t you wait? We’ll be on the plane soon. It’s a private jet.”
“C’mon, Sis, that’ll take hours. ‘Sides, I gotta pee like a racehorse. And we’re here, already.”
She looked at the store on our right then at Oliver, who still hadn’t even pumped five bucks.
“My boss gave me explicit instructions not to leave you alone for even a nanosecond.”
“He’s fuckin’ right out there! ‘Sides, where am I gonna run to? You guys are all I got for protection and transportation.” For extra credit, I even squirmed and grabbed my crotch. “Laura, don’t you remember what happened about six years ago when Mom and Dad took us to the Cape?”
Her eyes got wide then narrowed as she grimly nodded her head. I was still 12 and couldn’t hold it in. By the time we got to the Sagamore Bridge, I’d started peeing in my pants. Dad couldn’t just stop on the bridge and the only container we had was the empty liter Pepsi bottle that caused the crisis. In a panic, Laura reached down and threw the bottle at me and looked real hard out her window as I began peeing into it.
But the worst part was when I forgot to vent the opening and the backed-up air pressure made my piss spray out all over the car. Poor Laura, Dad and I got a golden shower and I even got the back of my Mom’s hair.
I raised my eyebrows at Laura and she looked around the interior of this nice, clean SUV then back out at Oliver.
“Are you sure you can’t wait to get back to Logan?”
“You really haven’t learned much from the government about water and air displacement, have you?” I grabbed my dick again.
“Alright, alright. Just stop touching yourself down there.” She opened the passenger side back door and said, “You know I love you, Bro, but there’s always going to be a grossness factor with you.”
“Thank you, Big Sister,” I said as I slid out.
“Oliver, Adam’s gotta use the bathroom.” We heard the nozzle stop and Blood came out from behind the SUV.
“Are you gonna go in with him?” he asked in a real smart-assed way.
“Well, obviously not, sir.”
“Then you’ll wait until I’m done here,” he said to us. I looked at Laura as I did a little Irish jig. Man, even taking a piss with these guys is like planning fucking D Day. Now I know what Congressman Feingold meant when he told me one time that our government moves more slowly than molasses running uphill in January.
“Uh, sir, trust me. That’s not a good idea. My kid brother’s got a bladder the size of a ping pong ball.” I nodded at Blood for emphasis.
“Well, I can’t go in with him. I gotta do this. Unless you want to trade,” he said gesturing at the pump.
“Shit, I think I just spritzed a little in my pants…”
“Damnit, hurry up!” I could tell his patience with me was wearing thin. Coffey, like I already said, was a Dad. Blood? No way. Never was, never will be. He doesn’t have the blood pressure for it, pardon the pun.
“Wait here. I’ll get the key.”
“No, it’s open. I just saw someone walk out and they didn’t have a key.” I started jogging to the bathroom.
“You better be out before me. I don’t care how full your bladder is.”
I got to the bathroom door just as Laura went into the store then at Blood. He peeked out from behind the Navigator and I stepped into the bathroom for just a minute. Then I stuck my head out and looked right at Coffey then at the Lincoln. Blood went back to what he was doing. I took a step toward Coffey’s car then remembered leaving something in the back seat of the SUV. And no fuckin’ way was I taking off without it.
The Bone Bridge- Chapter 23
(Ufa, Russian Federation, December 1991)
Milo Dragović’s onetime contemporary Ronald Reagan wasn’t the only leader called “the Great Communicator.” While Reagan swaggered through Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union was already on one knee, symbolically telling an absent Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!” his own countrymen were united through his sheer oratorical skills.
Now, 1000 miles from his native country, his breath exploding from his gaping mouth like an assembly line of ghosts, he slipped on slush as he ran for his life. His younger wife was in better shape- Back home, she jogged five kilometers daily. But she was no less scared than he; She just refused to show it.
How could they turn on him so fast?
His people, as always, were united but now against him. What initiatives and policies that had served so admirably well for 11 years were now suddenly, with the collapse of the Iron Curtain, out of vogue. Sure, prosperity could’ve been better, it always can be, but his people were still better off than they were in 1980. Who cared about 2000 political enemies getting “disappeared” or “re-educated”?
The clergy and damned human rights groups, for starters, plus the Soviet Politburo’s slow but sure withdrawal of any support. Still, how could the people turn on him so damned quickly?
On, on, his wife exhorted him and Milo Dragović’s 69 year-old body struggled to move at even his present crab-like pace. His lungs felt thick and the colder the air of Ufa grew, the more they burned. Eleven years of hiding in the presidential palace had made him as soft as a dumpling.
On, on, Irina’s shoves and tugs told him and his leaden legs somehow kept moving. They were finally exposed but they also knew they had to leave the armored BMW when their chauffer and last remaining bodyguard was killed. Neither of them knew how to drive so it was either stay in the car and wait for the sniper to find them with his armor-piercing rounds or become moving targets.
Dragović stopped and put his pudgy hands on his aching knees, his breath now ragged wheezes.
“Go. I’m… just holding you back.”
“Where you go, I go.” She kneeled down and looked into his gray eyes with her pale blue ones. Unlike Dragović, she was a pure Russian and as such was equal parts of all four elements, each one more untamed and irresistible than the last. She wasn’t a human being at the mercy of nature but a force of nature unto herself.
“Then we will both die,” he gasped. His lungs burned less with the respite even though they still felt like half-filled sandbags. “At least if we separate… you have a chance.”
“You will not talk like this,” she said. “I will not listen to you when you talk like this. If you die, we die.” For emphasis, Irina pulled from her sable coat’s right pocket a 7.62 X 25 mm Tokarev that she took off one of their dead bodyguards. 19 years ago, Irina Svetyana was a silver medal-winning biathlete for the Soviet delegation at the Sapporo Winter Olympics. Now 40, her only concession to her age was the severity in her demeanor and in her cheekbones owing to some very good plastic surgery. “Now move, my love. Move.”
He drew himself to his full height of 5 feet, 8 inches and took a couple of exploratory steps. His ample legs felt as if they were made of rubber but at least the burning in his lungs was slightly mitigated. He began trotting, his wife’s iron arm locked in his to keep him from losing his balance and footing in the snow clogged streets.
Presently, they came upon the Nesterov Art Museum on ul Gogolya west of the main street. Ufa was renowned for being a far-flung but cosmopolitan city with a strong bent for science and the humanities. The Nesterov Art Museum was known even in Moscow and Dragović’s native country as a must-see destination for any tourist in Ufa. He looked at the imperial-style eight columns and cheerful yellow paint job, the modest but still-imposing steps. Well, when in Rome…
Even as they entered the building, they donned sunglasses as they paid their admission. Still, sunglasses couldn’t hide the distinctive scar on Dragović’s right cheek, the one shaped exactly like a lightning bolt earned during his nation’s civil war in 1969.
Instinctively, Irina and Milo embedded themselves in the biggest crowds, all the while scanning their environment of anyone even remotely suspicious. But after today, with all four of their bodyguards picked off one by one and in broad daylight, their justified paranoia made weeding out the nonsuspicious much more inclusive. There’d been horrified witnesses, sure, but since Milo and Irina were obviously the real targets, the better half of human valor made for very few Good Samaritans. Which was fine by them. The last thing they needed was to be discovered and held in custody by the Ufa police. That’s how they got Nicolae Ceausescu and his own wife when they tried to flee two years ago.
Milo took a break from his paranoid search and lowered his sunglasses to admire a 15th century Russian icon. He was already ahead of the game compared with Ceausescu, Hitler and Mussolini. Ceausescu was machine gunned minutes after a two hour show trial on a military base, Hitler died in a bunker and Mussolini was also machine gunned then hung upside down like a side of beef at an abandoned gas station.
And their women also died with them, he darkly concluded.
If anyone had walked into the museum carrying a sniper rifle, the crowd could be counted on to raise a cry of alarm. So far, nothing but the usual hubbub of typical art aficionados like Dragović.
But in the end, he knew that as much as the caprices of their eagle-eyed hunter, what kept him alive was Irina. Ufa was her native city and she knew most of the streets and alleyways.
The couple let themselves be swept into a tour group. Both knew Russian fluently and they learned from snatches of conversation that they took a train from neighboring Samara to tour Ufa. Then Milo saw Irina lower her sunglasses, her right hand shifting in her matching sable muff. Following her line of vision, he saw a tall, very heavily-muscled man, possibly German, standing at an exit. His eyes radiated cruelty as he slowly began to advance on them.
Irina was about to pull out the Tokarev but Milo held her hand and shook his head. “This way,” he murmured as he pulled her away from the blonde giant.
Still believing in safety in numbers, Milo drifted with Irina to a smaller and looser knot of people until he, too, saw someone walking toward them from another exit. All the exits were covered, he realized. His next epiphany was that his only chance of survival would be if by some miracle his 40 year-old wife could singlehandedly kill a cadre of professional killers. What an ironic end for the Butcher of Central Europe, as he was also called.
The entrance perhaps. Milo saw no reason why that, too, wouldn’t be covered but it was all he could think of. Five minutes ago, it seemed as if getting inside a building was their only hope. Now, this museum threatened to be their mausoleum.
Now completely exposed with no human cover, Milo and Irina hustled back to the main entrance and stopped short when they saw the stocky, platinum blond walk in. The noose was cinched and Dragović knew that a blood bath that favored them was the only way out. Why hadn’t he accepted that Glock that Irina had taken off the other slain bodyguard?
“Leaving so soon? You just got here!” The man at the entrance spoke in perfect Russian but with a German accent. He began walking toward them. One hand remained in a slash pocket as if keeping a rifle or shotgun tucked between his body and black leather trench coat. “I heard the museum’s collection is a bit region-specific although their collection of Russian icons is to die for.”
“Let us pass and you can live,” Irina said evenly.
The blond man stopped as if he chose to and casually scratched his ear with his free hand. To the museum-goers, it still looked and sounded as if the three were actually having a discussion about art. Dragović looked behind him and at all sides and noted that all their pursuers had stopped.
“I’ll give you one chance to take those guns out of your muff and to show me your hands.”
“Or what? You’re obviously trying to kill us.”
“Only your bodyguards. You’re coming back to Eastern Europe with us to stand trial. If you’re smart enough to cooperate.”
“Either way, it’s a death sentence.”
“Resist and it’s a certainty.”
The next thing Dragović knew, the black sable muff fell flat to the ground. Irina had pulled out both hands simultaneously and pointed the Glock and Tokarev at the stocky blond. Keeping the Russian semiauto trained in him, she quickly swiveled her head and alternately pointed the German pistol at the other goons. People began to walk away quickly, to run even more quickly and the once-serene murmuring got faster and more high-pitched.
Surely they wouldn’t kill us in front of all these witnesses! No matter who he was and no matter what he’d done, murder was still murder and they weren’t back home. There was no mob justice in peaceful, cosmopolitan Ufa. This was part of the reason Irina had spirited him back home.
Eventually, the space between the three was completely clear and the herd mentality of the witnesses quickly knew enough to get away from the other stone-faced men in black leather who weren’t running. A lone security guard was foolhardy enough to try to occupy the No Man’s Land between the three principals.
“Pahzhalustah. Put your guns down,” the middle-aged man said in a quavering voice. Dragović noted the Russian rent-a-cop wasn’t armed with anything other than handcuffs and a night stick. He was sure that that fact hadn’t been lost on the few still left at the museum.
“Mr. Security Guard, I noticed you’re married. Do you have children?” He never looked at him but past him, right into the barrel of Irina’s Tokarev.
“None of your business. What does that have to do…?”
“Do you have children, sir?” the blond asked in a sharper tone of voice.
“Two. I have two. One still at home,” the security guard said, still looking. By now he was looking very paranoid and just realizing he was in way out of his depth and was now looking for a graceful exit out of this standoff.
“Then I strongly urge you to leave or the only way your children will continue to know you is through photo albums and your wife’s tearful recollections.”
“The police should intervene…”
“We are the police,” the German said and with his free left hand he produced from his other slash pocket a badge and ID.
“Interpol,” the guard read.
“Now leave while you can. This isn’t someone trying to steal a painting.” The guard vanished as if he teleported Hopefully, Dragović thought, he’ll have the presence of mind to call the Ufa constabulary. At least with them, they’d live… until after their extradition.
“So. Now what?” the blond asked, still speaking in perfect Russian.
“You are going to get behind us and let us leave or I will kill every Goddamned one of you,” Irina said, constantly taking in all three, her severe ponytail whipping this way and that.
“I don’t recall seeing you in Sapporo. I’m more of a hockey man, myself. However, your athletic reputation precedes you. You always were a better skier than a shooter, I seem to recall reading. Your inability to consistently hit the bullseye is what cost you the gold.”
“At this range, tovarisch, I cannot and will not miss.”
“Oh, I am sure, Irina. I do not think all those years living in the presidential palace back home, in the lap of luxury, has atrophied your skills that much.”
Dragović was tired of remaining silent and letting his wife do all the talking. After all, talking was his strength, they were on his turf. He used to be a head of state and would negotiate with Brezhnev and his countless successors, for God’s sake.
“I have money, in a Swiss account. Over 200 million dollars, American. Name your price.”
“Do you honestly think it prudent to insult me with a bribe?”
“Think of the alternative,” Irina said, looking around them. “You could leave here a rich man or die here a pauper.” She pulled back the hammers of the Glock and Tokarev for emphasis. “I may or may not get every one of you but you will be the first to die.”
The German glared at her, obviously identifying the armed woman as the clearest and most present danger. He pointed a Ruger from under his trench coat. Irina fired the Tokarev and the blond staggered back and fell.
Irina haltingly took a step or two forward and she, too, fell as her husband stared at her in horrified rage. The German never got a shot off. He looked behind him. One of the other Germans, the heavily-muscled one, was still training his own Glock at his wife’s supine form. Irina was still alive but gasping for air through one good but one punctured lung. The German at the entrance was getting up, poking at a bloodless hole in his black shirt. The shot from behind spoiled Irina’s aim.
Dragović fell to his knees, sobbing. The tears were real but he had another reason for getting closer to the guns still clutched in his beloved’s hands. He curled his pasty, pudgy fingers over the Tokarev and whispered to her, “So it ends. But not like sheep…”
“…but like lions,” Irina gasped.
Dragović shot at the German again but took out the door behind him instead. Irina suddenly rolled over and evacuated the skull of her muscular attacker. The third German, a wiry brunette, riddled Irina with a series of quick bursts from his semi-auto. One round ricocheted and shattered Milo’s ankle and he went down on one knee. He unsteadily lifted the two and a half pound weapon and Hans Dietrich blew his brains out with his Ruger.
He looked dispassionately at his colleague’s semi-headless corpse in the distance then at the two bodies of what used to be the ruling couple of an obscure but oil-rich central European nation. Dietrich stepped over Milo Dragović’s body just in time to see a bolt of blood slowly strike against his scarred cheek.
“That’s for my father,” Dietrich said before spitting on both corpses.
(Nesterov Art Museum, present day)
“You have to understand, Herr Dietrich,” the head museum curator began, “we’ve never been plagued with a problem quite like this.”
The blood on the marble floor had long since been cleaned up but Dietrich nonetheless knew the curator of the Nesterov museum was standing in the precise spot where Mr. and Mrs. Dragović had died almost 18 years ago. Dietrich doubted that anyone would recognize the two “Interpol” agents who’d survived that day. His job in 1991 having been done, Dietrich and Günter left Fritz’s body behind before the Ufa police could get there.
This investigation and acquisition, if successful, would mark the first time that Dietrich had plucked from the gates of Hell a ghost that he had personally put there. If the witness sightings and surveillance videos were to be believed, then Milo and Irina Dragović had finally begun haunting the place of their untimely deaths.
Dragović had been dubbed by a less compliant western press as “the dragon of central Europe.” His casual butchery of his self-perceived political enemies also earned him the moniker “The Butcher of the Urals.”
Yet before he got in bad odor with his people and the Soviet Politburo for his excesses, he was also justly named “The Great Communicator.” Dragović’s oratorical skills were so refined and so effective his speeches were called “hypnotic” by even his most virulent detractors.
During his lifetime, it was said he could even mobilize the dead into doing his bidding. Well, Dietrich thought, let’s put that to the test and see if Dragović could live up to his own press.
It looked as if A.D.E.P.T. had the Moss kid and that he was now being protected. He had the power to unite the spirit world. So Dietrich and his employer decided they needed their own “Great Communicator.”
Milo Dragović’s onetime contemporary Ronald Reagan wasn’t the only leader called “the Great Communicator.” While Reagan swaggered through Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union was already on one knee, symbolically telling an absent Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!” his own countrymen were united through his sheer oratorical skills.
Now, 1000 miles from his native country, his breath exploding from his gaping mouth like an assembly line of ghosts, he slipped on slush as he ran for his life. His younger wife was in better shape- Back home, she jogged five kilometers daily. But she was no less scared than he; She just refused to show it.
How could they turn on him so fast?
His people, as always, were united but now against him. What initiatives and policies that had served so admirably well for 11 years were now suddenly, with the collapse of the Iron Curtain, out of vogue. Sure, prosperity could’ve been better, it always can be, but his people were still better off than they were in 1980. Who cared about 2000 political enemies getting “disappeared” or “re-educated”?
The clergy and damned human rights groups, for starters, plus the Soviet Politburo’s slow but sure withdrawal of any support. Still, how could the people turn on him so damned quickly?
On, on, his wife exhorted him and Milo Dragović’s 69 year-old body struggled to move at even his present crab-like pace. His lungs felt thick and the colder the air of Ufa grew, the more they burned. Eleven years of hiding in the presidential palace had made him as soft as a dumpling.
On, on, Irina’s shoves and tugs told him and his leaden legs somehow kept moving. They were finally exposed but they also knew they had to leave the armored BMW when their chauffer and last remaining bodyguard was killed. Neither of them knew how to drive so it was either stay in the car and wait for the sniper to find them with his armor-piercing rounds or become moving targets.
Dragović stopped and put his pudgy hands on his aching knees, his breath now ragged wheezes.
“Go. I’m… just holding you back.”
“Where you go, I go.” She kneeled down and looked into his gray eyes with her pale blue ones. Unlike Dragović, she was a pure Russian and as such was equal parts of all four elements, each one more untamed and irresistible than the last. She wasn’t a human being at the mercy of nature but a force of nature unto herself.
“Then we will both die,” he gasped. His lungs burned less with the respite even though they still felt like half-filled sandbags. “At least if we separate… you have a chance.”
“You will not talk like this,” she said. “I will not listen to you when you talk like this. If you die, we die.” For emphasis, Irina pulled from her sable coat’s right pocket a 7.62 X 25 mm Tokarev that she took off one of their dead bodyguards. 19 years ago, Irina Svetyana was a silver medal-winning biathlete for the Soviet delegation at the Sapporo Winter Olympics. Now 40, her only concession to her age was the severity in her demeanor and in her cheekbones owing to some very good plastic surgery. “Now move, my love. Move.”
He drew himself to his full height of 5 feet, 8 inches and took a couple of exploratory steps. His ample legs felt as if they were made of rubber but at least the burning in his lungs was slightly mitigated. He began trotting, his wife’s iron arm locked in his to keep him from losing his balance and footing in the snow clogged streets.
Presently, they came upon the Nesterov Art Museum on ul Gogolya west of the main street. Ufa was renowned for being a far-flung but cosmopolitan city with a strong bent for science and the humanities. The Nesterov Art Museum was known even in Moscow and Dragović’s native country as a must-see destination for any tourist in Ufa. He looked at the imperial-style eight columns and cheerful yellow paint job, the modest but still-imposing steps. Well, when in Rome…
Even as they entered the building, they donned sunglasses as they paid their admission. Still, sunglasses couldn’t hide the distinctive scar on Dragović’s right cheek, the one shaped exactly like a lightning bolt earned during his nation’s civil war in 1969.
Instinctively, Irina and Milo embedded themselves in the biggest crowds, all the while scanning their environment of anyone even remotely suspicious. But after today, with all four of their bodyguards picked off one by one and in broad daylight, their justified paranoia made weeding out the nonsuspicious much more inclusive. There’d been horrified witnesses, sure, but since Milo and Irina were obviously the real targets, the better half of human valor made for very few Good Samaritans. Which was fine by them. The last thing they needed was to be discovered and held in custody by the Ufa police. That’s how they got Nicolae Ceausescu and his own wife when they tried to flee two years ago.
Milo took a break from his paranoid search and lowered his sunglasses to admire a 15th century Russian icon. He was already ahead of the game compared with Ceausescu, Hitler and Mussolini. Ceausescu was machine gunned minutes after a two hour show trial on a military base, Hitler died in a bunker and Mussolini was also machine gunned then hung upside down like a side of beef at an abandoned gas station.
And their women also died with them, he darkly concluded.
If anyone had walked into the museum carrying a sniper rifle, the crowd could be counted on to raise a cry of alarm. So far, nothing but the usual hubbub of typical art aficionados like Dragović.
But in the end, he knew that as much as the caprices of their eagle-eyed hunter, what kept him alive was Irina. Ufa was her native city and she knew most of the streets and alleyways.
The couple let themselves be swept into a tour group. Both knew Russian fluently and they learned from snatches of conversation that they took a train from neighboring Samara to tour Ufa. Then Milo saw Irina lower her sunglasses, her right hand shifting in her matching sable muff. Following her line of vision, he saw a tall, very heavily-muscled man, possibly German, standing at an exit. His eyes radiated cruelty as he slowly began to advance on them.
Irina was about to pull out the Tokarev but Milo held her hand and shook his head. “This way,” he murmured as he pulled her away from the blonde giant.
Still believing in safety in numbers, Milo drifted with Irina to a smaller and looser knot of people until he, too, saw someone walking toward them from another exit. All the exits were covered, he realized. His next epiphany was that his only chance of survival would be if by some miracle his 40 year-old wife could singlehandedly kill a cadre of professional killers. What an ironic end for the Butcher of Central Europe, as he was also called.
The entrance perhaps. Milo saw no reason why that, too, wouldn’t be covered but it was all he could think of. Five minutes ago, it seemed as if getting inside a building was their only hope. Now, this museum threatened to be their mausoleum.
Now completely exposed with no human cover, Milo and Irina hustled back to the main entrance and stopped short when they saw the stocky, platinum blond walk in. The noose was cinched and Dragović knew that a blood bath that favored them was the only way out. Why hadn’t he accepted that Glock that Irina had taken off the other slain bodyguard?
“Leaving so soon? You just got here!” The man at the entrance spoke in perfect Russian but with a German accent. He began walking toward them. One hand remained in a slash pocket as if keeping a rifle or shotgun tucked between his body and black leather trench coat. “I heard the museum’s collection is a bit region-specific although their collection of Russian icons is to die for.”
“Let us pass and you can live,” Irina said evenly.
The blond man stopped as if he chose to and casually scratched his ear with his free hand. To the museum-goers, it still looked and sounded as if the three were actually having a discussion about art. Dragović looked behind him and at all sides and noted that all their pursuers had stopped.
“I’ll give you one chance to take those guns out of your muff and to show me your hands.”
“Or what? You’re obviously trying to kill us.”
“Only your bodyguards. You’re coming back to Eastern Europe with us to stand trial. If you’re smart enough to cooperate.”
“Either way, it’s a death sentence.”
“Resist and it’s a certainty.”
The next thing Dragović knew, the black sable muff fell flat to the ground. Irina had pulled out both hands simultaneously and pointed the Glock and Tokarev at the stocky blond. Keeping the Russian semiauto trained in him, she quickly swiveled her head and alternately pointed the German pistol at the other goons. People began to walk away quickly, to run even more quickly and the once-serene murmuring got faster and more high-pitched.
Surely they wouldn’t kill us in front of all these witnesses! No matter who he was and no matter what he’d done, murder was still murder and they weren’t back home. There was no mob justice in peaceful, cosmopolitan Ufa. This was part of the reason Irina had spirited him back home.
Eventually, the space between the three was completely clear and the herd mentality of the witnesses quickly knew enough to get away from the other stone-faced men in black leather who weren’t running. A lone security guard was foolhardy enough to try to occupy the No Man’s Land between the three principals.
“Pahzhalustah. Put your guns down,” the middle-aged man said in a quavering voice. Dragović noted the Russian rent-a-cop wasn’t armed with anything other than handcuffs and a night stick. He was sure that that fact hadn’t been lost on the few still left at the museum.
“Mr. Security Guard, I noticed you’re married. Do you have children?” He never looked at him but past him, right into the barrel of Irina’s Tokarev.
“None of your business. What does that have to do…?”
“Do you have children, sir?” the blond asked in a sharper tone of voice.
“Two. I have two. One still at home,” the security guard said, still looking. By now he was looking very paranoid and just realizing he was in way out of his depth and was now looking for a graceful exit out of this standoff.
“Then I strongly urge you to leave or the only way your children will continue to know you is through photo albums and your wife’s tearful recollections.”
“The police should intervene…”
“We are the police,” the German said and with his free left hand he produced from his other slash pocket a badge and ID.
“Interpol,” the guard read.
“Now leave while you can. This isn’t someone trying to steal a painting.” The guard vanished as if he teleported Hopefully, Dragović thought, he’ll have the presence of mind to call the Ufa constabulary. At least with them, they’d live… until after their extradition.
“So. Now what?” the blond asked, still speaking in perfect Russian.
“You are going to get behind us and let us leave or I will kill every Goddamned one of you,” Irina said, constantly taking in all three, her severe ponytail whipping this way and that.
“I don’t recall seeing you in Sapporo. I’m more of a hockey man, myself. However, your athletic reputation precedes you. You always were a better skier than a shooter, I seem to recall reading. Your inability to consistently hit the bullseye is what cost you the gold.”
“At this range, tovarisch, I cannot and will not miss.”
“Oh, I am sure, Irina. I do not think all those years living in the presidential palace back home, in the lap of luxury, has atrophied your skills that much.”
Dragović was tired of remaining silent and letting his wife do all the talking. After all, talking was his strength, they were on his turf. He used to be a head of state and would negotiate with Brezhnev and his countless successors, for God’s sake.
“I have money, in a Swiss account. Over 200 million dollars, American. Name your price.”
“Do you honestly think it prudent to insult me with a bribe?”
“Think of the alternative,” Irina said, looking around them. “You could leave here a rich man or die here a pauper.” She pulled back the hammers of the Glock and Tokarev for emphasis. “I may or may not get every one of you but you will be the first to die.”
The German glared at her, obviously identifying the armed woman as the clearest and most present danger. He pointed a Ruger from under his trench coat. Irina fired the Tokarev and the blond staggered back and fell.
Irina haltingly took a step or two forward and she, too, fell as her husband stared at her in horrified rage. The German never got a shot off. He looked behind him. One of the other Germans, the heavily-muscled one, was still training his own Glock at his wife’s supine form. Irina was still alive but gasping for air through one good but one punctured lung. The German at the entrance was getting up, poking at a bloodless hole in his black shirt. The shot from behind spoiled Irina’s aim.
Dragović fell to his knees, sobbing. The tears were real but he had another reason for getting closer to the guns still clutched in his beloved’s hands. He curled his pasty, pudgy fingers over the Tokarev and whispered to her, “So it ends. But not like sheep…”
“…but like lions,” Irina gasped.
Dragović shot at the German again but took out the door behind him instead. Irina suddenly rolled over and evacuated the skull of her muscular attacker. The third German, a wiry brunette, riddled Irina with a series of quick bursts from his semi-auto. One round ricocheted and shattered Milo’s ankle and he went down on one knee. He unsteadily lifted the two and a half pound weapon and Hans Dietrich blew his brains out with his Ruger.
He looked dispassionately at his colleague’s semi-headless corpse in the distance then at the two bodies of what used to be the ruling couple of an obscure but oil-rich central European nation. Dietrich stepped over Milo Dragović’s body just in time to see a bolt of blood slowly strike against his scarred cheek.
“That’s for my father,” Dietrich said before spitting on both corpses.
(Nesterov Art Museum, present day)
“You have to understand, Herr Dietrich,” the head museum curator began, “we’ve never been plagued with a problem quite like this.”
The blood on the marble floor had long since been cleaned up but Dietrich nonetheless knew the curator of the Nesterov museum was standing in the precise spot where Mr. and Mrs. Dragović had died almost 18 years ago. Dietrich doubted that anyone would recognize the two “Interpol” agents who’d survived that day. His job in 1991 having been done, Dietrich and Günter left Fritz’s body behind before the Ufa police could get there.
This investigation and acquisition, if successful, would mark the first time that Dietrich had plucked from the gates of Hell a ghost that he had personally put there. If the witness sightings and surveillance videos were to be believed, then Milo and Irina Dragović had finally begun haunting the place of their untimely deaths.
Dragović had been dubbed by a less compliant western press as “the dragon of central Europe.” His casual butchery of his self-perceived political enemies also earned him the moniker “The Butcher of the Urals.”
Yet before he got in bad odor with his people and the Soviet Politburo for his excesses, he was also justly named “The Great Communicator.” Dragović’s oratorical skills were so refined and so effective his speeches were called “hypnotic” by even his most virulent detractors.
During his lifetime, it was said he could even mobilize the dead into doing his bidding. Well, Dietrich thought, let’s put that to the test and see if Dragović could live up to his own press.
It looked as if A.D.E.P.T. had the Moss kid and that he was now being protected. He had the power to unite the spirit world. So Dietrich and his employer decided they needed their own “Great Communicator.”
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Bone Bridge: Chapter 22
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.
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.
Friday, October 16, 2009
The Bone Bridge: Chapter 21
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 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.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
The Bone Bridge- Chapter 20
(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.
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.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
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