Devotion Apart

  With a tap of my finger, I sent the profiles of all six men to Grahm. Their names, faces, and entire lives would now be revealed to the city and the nation. I included everything but their present location. That was all mine.

  Without turning on the headlights, I drove the Jeep closer and parked at the curb nearest the building's front door. The street was dimly-lit, and mainly automated vehicles drove on the wide street, running their preprogrammed errands. No one would observe my infiltration of the suite above, except Craig, if he was monitoring my activities, which was likely.

  I took off my boots and socks, and left them in the Jeep.

  From the sidewalk, instead of entering the building's front doors, I reached overhead and climbed up the structure's ornamental framework to the second story ledge. The ledge was only ten inches wide, but I'd walked on things much thinner.

  One window at a time, I tested the locks, working my way toward the far corner of the building. Finally, I found a window that was locked, but the frame had bowed from heat or weight, and I slid my knife through the gap to unlock the window. It took some careful balancing to climb into the window, without knocking over a potted cactus on an empty bookshelf. Gently, I hopped to the wood floor, which was covered by large sectional rugs. Two men slept a few yards away on the nearest sofa. They didn't stir as I quietly slid the window closed.

  Beyond the kitchen counter, I moved past the sleeping men to one of the bedrooms, where Nichols slept on his belly. Then I moved quietly to the bedside. The apartment was warm, so he was under no sheet or blanket. He still wore his slacks, but no shirt. I pounced by straddling him with my legs. One arm went around his neck to choke him, while the other hand covered his mouth.

  He thrashed wildly on the bed. He outweighed me my thirty pounds, and I feared he might rise from the bed and crash into the dresser, mirror, or exercise bike nearby. But in seconds, he was out. I released him immediately, so his blood would begin to flow back to his brain and no damage would be done. Using the duct tape, I bound his ankles, wrists, then his mouth. My methods as a Christian were unorthodox. But I knew if I didn't get to a man like Nichols before the authorities did, he might never be reached with the gospel.

  Before he gained consciousness, I picked him up over my shoulder and walked outside the bedroom. The apartment was still. I silently swung open the front door, then descended one flight before reaching ground level. Once through the outer glass doors, it was only a few steps to my Jeep, where I hefted Nichols into the back seat.

  I climbed into the driver's seat, trembling from the adrenalin.

  Nichols woke as I drove west on the edge of the city. He kicked the door and screamed through his nostrils.

  "Sit still," I warned him, "or it'll be worse for you."

  Twenty minutes later, I pulled off the highway to Vegas, passed the Devotion water treatment plant, and drove up to Trinity Road where the desert spanned indefinitely to the north. Here, I drove into the desert over a small ridge, then down into a bowl where cacti grew amid the soft sand. I left the Jeep running with the headlights on.

  "It's time," I said to Nichols as I opened his door and grabbed his feet. "There's no hope for you to become a better person, so you need to die."

  He fought me, but he was bound and lost the battle. I'd wrestled down bull tapirs, so Nichols was no real fight. By his feet, I dragged him into the desert within the beam of the headlights. There, I left him amidst two young yucca trees and a cane cactus called a cholla. From the Jeep, I fetched a long-handled shovel and returned. Next to his head, I began to dig at the dry soil.

  After several shovel scoops, I paused to rest and crouched next to his face. His eyes were wide, blinking, desperate, exactly as I wanted.

  "You know, if I knew you'd change your ways, I'd let you live." I sighed loudly. "But we both know that you love the taste of evil pleasures from others' misery. You'll never do anything else but prey on the innocent, Nichols. Look at you. A man who could've done so much good in the world. Now, you'll face God and answer for your sins. And no one will ever know you died out here, or where you're buried. You'll die an anonymous death, but that's all you deserve."

  I continued to dig. He tried to speak past the tape over his mouth, but I ignored him.

  The hole gaped next to his head, so close that he could turn his face and look into its shadowy depths. I shed my shirt and climbed into the hole, throwing dirt over my head, and intentionally upon him a few times.

  "That should be deep enough," I said after an hour, and threw the shovel out of the hole. "No one will ever find you in there."

  With effort from inside the grave, I leaped up and took hold of Nichols' legs, and dragged him into the hole with me. It was at least six feet deep, and suffocating to the senses even for me to kneel over the man who now lay on his back in the pitch black grave. "I'm going to remove the tape from your mouth for a few minutes, so choose your words wisely. It's the least I can do for a man about to die."

  Feeling in the shadows, I tore off the tape. He panted several times, struggling to breathe past his panic. The stars shined brightly above, so all he could see was me and God's starlit sky.

  "Please, let me live." His voice was hoarse. "I'll give you anything you want. I have money, lots of it."

  "How stupid are you?" I asked. "I'm removing you from the living because you're evil, and the first thing you can do is appeal to my greed? To bribe me? You have nothing to offer me. I'm rich in all the ways you are not, and the one thing I want, which is your life, is exactly what I'm taking. I told you to choose your words wisely."

  "I'm trying!"

  "You'll never speak again." My voice was hard, because his heart was hard. "For eternity, you'll be screaming in anguish for living selfishly, killing, and stealing. What do you have to say? You're done, Nichols. You're not even interested in admitting your wrongs. You'd rather enter hell and damnation with a heart full of pride and arrogance. You don't even want God's mercy or forgiveness. No, you have nothing to offer anyone any longer. This is best for everyone."

  He fought me as I put the tape back on his mouth. I climbed out of the hole and took my time scraping dirt into the hole onto his feet. He wept with great sobs through his tape, but I didn't respond.

  After a few more shovel fulls, I stopped and leaned into the hold.

  "The cops know who you are now, Nichols. There's no hope for you on the streets. Not any longer. Do you really want to live, even if you spend years in prison?"

  His answer was muffled, but it sounded like an affirmative response. Again, I dropped down into the grave, then wrestled him free from the dirt and stood him upright. Now straining more than before, I hefted Nichols onto my shoulder, then pushed him higher to squirm like a worm over the edge and out of the grave.

  It took me several attempts to climb out myself. Once above ground, I filled in the hole, then stashed the shovel against the cholla cactus.

  "You're going to come clean," I said to Nichols as I stood him upright, "or I'll dig that hole again."

  He nodded gently, his whole body slumping.

  Where he stood, I knelt and unwound the duct tape from his ankles. I took him by the arm and led him back to the Jeep, where he climbed into the passenger seat. Both of us were covered in sweat and soil.

  The drive back into the city was too short, it seemed, because I couldn't decide exactly what else to say to Nichols. Maybe there were no right words at that point. He had been broken and humbled.

  Now it was up to God to work where man couldn't.

  In front of the police station, we sat in the Jeep for a few minutes.

  "This won't be easy for you," I said quietly, "but you need to take this opportunity to get right with God. That'll include answering the questions the authorities have for you. But more importantly, you need a new heart. Only God can help you with that. You're a mess inside, Nichols, and it's time to go to the cross of Jesus Christ and appeal to Him for forgiveness. Let's go."

  I walked around th
e Jeep and opened his door, then took the tape off his wrists. On his own, he removed the tape from his mouth.

  "Come on." I stepped back. "I'll be right beside you."

  He shook sand out of his pants and wiped at the sand that clung to his face and bare chest. His efforts didn't help his appearance much. In front of me, he walked into the station, and we were greeted by the familiar hologram.

  "I'm here. . ." he glanced at me, then back at the hologram, "to turn myself in."

  Inside the entrance, two night shift officers in uniform rose from their chairs in front of a hologram projection that produced lude images. We'd interrupted their pastime.

  "Whoa!" one officer exclaimed. "What happened to you two?"

  Nichols looked to me again for direction.

  "Tell him who you are," I said.

  "My name is Kirby Nichols." He swallowed hard and shifted on his feet. "I'm responsible for the slaughter house abductions."

  The officer frowned at Nichols, then pointed at me.

  "And you? What's your story?"

  "I'm just here for moral support." I placed my hand on Nichols' shoulder. "Put him in a holding cell and call Officer Grahm. He'll want to deal with this. It's his case."

  "Yeah, okay." The officer scratched his jaw. "Come this way."

  He led Nichols away.

  "Nichols?" I called and he looked back. "Settle in. I'll visit you in a few days."

  His eyes didn't seem as cold as they had been earlier that night. I could tell he was defeated. The gospel could heal inside Nichols what the bitter night in the desert had confronted and exposed. He was a man not ready to die and face what lay beyond, so I prayed he took advantage of the moment.

  *~*~*

  As the days passed. I explored the streets on my motorcycle, often finding intersections blocked by protestors or lines of homeless people waiting for food or medication. Janae started to make an extra bagged lunch for me each day, and I prayed expectantly each morning, trusting God that He would lead me to give it to just the right person, all to express the love of Christ to one more person. On the outside of each bagged lunch, with a marker, I drew a simple cross.

  The protests that spanned the city, ranging every day, were both bizarre and confusing. The people wanted to attach themselves to something greater than themselves, and so they attached themselves to an idea that carried some purpose, even if it was an empty one. Some chanted for global citizenship, and others screamed against the possibility of more pandemics. One rally I came across was protesting sandstorms, for Devotion had occasionally been swept over by a wall of sand from the northwest desert.

  Although I knew such protests were loosely aimed at climate control, what the people didn't seem to understand was that the climate couldn't be controlled. The sun couldn't be managed and the orbit of the moon couldn't be changed. Having lived in the Amazon for so many years, I had learned how God had created the whole earth with its cycles based on laws to maintain a careful and intentional balance to sustain life. The Amazon River couldn't be turned off, and the cooling and warming of the earth couldn't be altered.

  But mankind had attempted to declare themselves as the cause and the remedy for so long, society didn't seem capable of understanding that they were not the initiators or fixers of anything that God had set in order.

  Each day, I visited my father, and I was thankful that he had run out of television topics to talk about. I asked if I could share with him what I'd been doing in the city. It gave me a chance to rehearse God's goodness and testify to my father about a very gradual change happening in the city, from the police department down to the street level.

  My father listened wide-eyed, asking important questions about the people I was interacting with. Fascinated and silent one day, I watched his face as he stared at his muted tv, as if he was comparing its empty offerings with the bounty of impacting a city for God and with God.

  The weekend arrived, and I made an appointment to visit Nichols in the county jail that afternoon. However, I nearly flipped out of my hammock when Craig barged into my bedroom before dawn.

  "There's been another murder!" He wore pajama bottoms, a robe, and smelled like he hadn't showered in days. And that's coming from someone who had bathed in muddy rivers for two decades!

  "There's a total blackout around the scene. RASH has been hacked. Come on! Get up, Cord! This has gotta be a clue about Cora's murder!"

  I tugged on my trousers as I blinked awake and followed him down the hall, then descended to the workshop. He was talking too quickly for me to follow, so once he sat at the console, I crouched beside him to study the screens.

  "Slow down, Craig," I urged. "What murder? You built RASH, so if someone hacked it, you'll find them."

  "No, this is different than a standard hack." His fingers moved over the holographic keys, then swept through the air where laser sensors read his gestures. "Look. The police are all over the scene now, but when I turn back these cameras to the time of the murder, everything is dark. It's an inside job. Someone turned off the system so we can't see who did the killing."

  "You called it another murder. You've seen something like this before?"

  "Not in the last two years, since RASH has been up. It's a serial killer. They call him the Umbrella Killer. He leaves an open umbrella next to his victims. There was a string of murders years ago. I thought I'd be able to catch him, but he's been underground. Now this. Look. Dark frames. Nothing recorded anywhere, or from any angle."

  "You said Shay can control RASH from his end. So it has to be him. Somehow, he's linked to this serial killer?"

  "Maybe, I don't know. I already checked, and he was out of the country. I mean, someone near him must have access to the system as well, or it was hacked and shut down."

  "So, this is just like my sister's murder. No witnesses. Black screens. Nothing captured, and everything was dark."

  I walked away from the console and he turned toward me.

  "If you find this guy, you'll solve your sister's murder." His voice trembled. "Shay's gotta be connected to this. I'm sure he had your sister killed. Now, he's murdering others. Maybe he's using the Umbrella Killer as a cover, or a copycat, to take out his enemies."

  I nodded, but I wasn't buying his logic.

  "What're the chances they know we're onto them?" I asked. "Or that they know we're here with access to the same system, able to go dark when we want to as well?"

  "I'd be dead if Shay knew. Besides, we're coming at the whole surveillance grid from another direction, one that I designed. To find us, they'd have to decode and search every digital signal in the city for an encrypted signature they don't know for sure is even there. It would be like a salmon swimming up a specific water pipe in Tokyo when it was born to spawn up the Kuskokwim River in Alaska. It just won't happen. We're undetectable as long as we don't reveal to anyone what we're doing. You haven't, have you?"

  "No." I leaned against the wall, my arms crossed. "Could Shay be selling access to others? Maybe for a price, he's willing to darken the system so people can commit the unspeakable without anyone seeing. You said he's enterprising. All he thinks about is money. Maybe he's outsourcing RASH?"

  "Anything's possible." His fingers flew. "There would be other camera blackouts if that's the case. A pattern. I'll start a search. Let's see here. . ."

  In seconds, Craig seemed to have forgotten that I was there. As I climbed the basement stairs, I wondered if I had time to study the crime scene at the Ruins before I went to the county jail to visit Nichols at noon. After a quick breakfast of oatmeal with Tyler, I drove the Jeep across the city to the Ruins, where the murder had taken place.

  The Ruins had stood as long as I had been alive. They consisted of four monstrous cement towers, known for their slum apartments, housing the city's poorest citizens, with the tent city residents the only exceptions. As I parked in front of the Royal, the tower on the northeast, I noted the same deplorable conditions along the street as I had known as a young man, w
hen I had cruised the street on bikes or in stolen vehicles with the Airport Boyz. Graffiti brightly decorated every accessible inch of the buildings, the painted letters sharp and defined, giving each image the impression of horned demons.

  Food carts and taco trucks littered the curbside, some manned, others torched and abandoned. A dead dog lay on the warming pavement in the middle of the street, and a few colorfully-painted low-riders cruised past it without notice, its guts spewed across half of one lane.

  Beyond the Royal stood the Reina, the Rojo, and the Ridgeway. Between the Reina and the Royal, a crowd had gathered at the site of the murder.

  The crowd slowly dispersed as I approached. The body had been removed, and the coroner's vehicle drove quietly away. What remained was crime scene tape, suited investigators, and a splash of red across the pavement. I spotted Fletcher, the sharpest dressed man in sight, not expensively, but like he took his job seriously. His top button was undone, but his tie remained tight and his face appeared grim as he held up possible evidence with white-gloved hands. He noticed me, and spoke softly to a uniformed officer who approached me.

  "Detective Fletcher would like to speak to you." The officer lifted the crime scene tape. "Don't try to run. We have officers all over the city right now."

  "Yes, sir." I walked into the crime scene, skirted the crimson stain, and stopped next to Fletcher. "Your friend thinks I'm a suspect."

  In his baritone voice, Fletcher thanked the officer and dismissed him, then faced me, his height eclipsing my own.

  "You're about the only one I know who isn't a suspect in this city." Fletcher gestured to the blood spatter. "You ever see anything like this in Brazil? You'd think a hunter slaughtered a deer right here."