“I have no intention of dying, Father. If I lose Victor, I will give you the salt, pepper, and hot sauce.”
Obatala laughed, but the sound was chilling and was made worse when his hellish eyes blazed brightened. He tapped her forehead with the top of his eagle staff. Although the handle looked like solid gold, she felt feathers.
Immediately she somersaulted into darkness and was chased into oblivion by the sound of Rascal’s whine. She came to leaning against the oak tree with her knees rooted in mud. Evie needed a few minutes to swallow down the bile knotted up in her throat. Eventually the world stopped spinning long enough for her to rise, but she had to use the tree for support.
It was dead. The bark shimmied off the tree like dandruff flakes. Evie choked down her grief with the bile.
Rascal tried to rise too, only to slump back down without an iota of grace. His fur bristled and his eyes were vacant. At last, he rotated his face toward hers. His eyes reflected a sharper intelligence.
She said, “Me too, boy. I feel different.” She remembered things she had forgotten and knew things that she wished she didn’t know. She felt like…Evelyn.
She resolved not to waste any more time on her grief. It was the sirens that forced her into action. The shrill sounds by blasted through her cobweb-coated thoughts.
Police cars swarmed and then braked randomly around the school. Sister Anne ran out to meet the police officers who poured out of the sedans. At the same time, she avoided eye contact with Evie. The nun handed one of the first responders something. It flapped in the breeze. From Evie’s vantage point she saw that it was a photograph of Victor.
Evie watched the churn of activities spin around her in efficient collaboration. A blue forensics van screeched to a halt from the opposite direction and a team in windbreakers spilled out and appeared to confer with a lanky man in a black coat that looked one size too large. He had a narrow face, pockmarked skin and small eyes. One of the police officers, the clean-cut one Sister Anne had given the photograph to, spoke in his ear.
Rascal, who still seemed dizzy, wagged his tail erratically. Evie looked at her watch. It felt like she and Rascal had disappeared for eons instead of seconds. Move between time?
Evie couldn’t be there when she needed to focus elsewhere. Thin face saw her. He stuck an ink pen in his mouth like a smoke and looked down at the picture. He possibly saw a resemblance.
Just as he moved in her direction, Sister Annesaid something to him. Evie grabbed the opportunity to flee as additional police officers spilled out of their patrol cars.
Evie thought she may have left her hysterics in paradise. Calmly, but wearily, she said, “C’mon, Rascal, let’s go home.”
She saw a single snowflake flutter from heaven.
Evie allowed herself a smile. She said, “Thank you, Father.”
Chapter 6 - No Peace, No Safety
Paula slammed the apartment door closed, pressed her back against the hard wood and slid, without any grace, onto the floor. She had to stretch her legs just to work her hands through her jeans pockets and fish out her cellphone. Even now, miles away and in the sanctity of her home, she didn’t feel safe.
They hadn’t seen what she’d seen.
They didn’t know what she knew.
Tears slipped from her eyes and down her cinnamon-hued cheeks. She cupped her thin fingers around her phone and for a moment, she was paralyzed as she fought to remember his number. Speed dial? She laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. Soon enough her laughter turned to sobs.
How had they gotten it so wrong? If she had known, Paula would never have walked into…into what? The lion’s den?
She found his name and pressed the telephone icon. Once the call started to ring in, she began to breathe, a little stunned that she had been holding her breath at all.
“Please,” she wheezed, “c’mon, c’mon pick up.” It was a prayer.
Maybe he would think she was crazy. But Paula knew what she’d seen. Although she tried hard not to remember, not to take it all in again, she was mentally right back there in that shop, in that hell.
Despite Paula’s revulsion by what Evelyn had done to her people. Paula couldn’t help feeling awed that she’d shared space with the deity.
Perhaps Robbie had been right. When the women had been only a few feet apart, Paula had gloated. All the fuss had been about nothing. The woman was just that…a woman. She hadn’t paid Paula any attention, and obviously hadn’t known at all what they had planned.
She looked like a soccer mom, sitting at the cash register and drinking her tea.
Paula had felt quite silly as she strutted among floral displays just to keep an eye on her. How stupid did she feel that she had bought in to all that mystical talk about the orishas her entire life? She may as well have believed in Santa Claus.
Plus there were all those secret meetings Robbie had gone to, without her. The only reason Paula knew what his friends had been up to was because Robbie needed to prove that he wasn’t screwing around with another woman, and that he needed her to keep the orisha under surveillance. Of course Paula wanted to do her part. It had sounded intriguing like secret agent stuff.
So how in the hell did she get involved in a kidnapping? How did she fall for the, nobody-would-get-hurt jingle?
“Hey? How’d it go?”
Paula jumped at the sound of his voice. When she first tried to talk, the words got trapped in her throat and she could only emit a squeak. “Bad. It was real bad.”
“What do you mean?” Apparently, he wasn’t expecting her to say that because the trajectory of his tone had dived into disappointment.
Paula raised her knee and used it as a brace for her elbow as she cupped her forehead. The words were rushing out of her soul while her heart hammered so loudly that she could barely hear his demands to calm down.
Outside the wind rose to a gale and she could hear snow pelting the windows. Although she had turned on the lights, the room seemed to darken. There were shadows everywhere.
He screamed in her ear, “Talk to me!”
“Don’t shout,” she begged. “I tried to help her. I felt sorry for her. She knew something was wrong. She looked at me and then all the flowers in the shop wilted. I was surrounded by dead things. She looked at me. Her eyes…her eyes...” Her voice tapered off.
Paula squeezed her eyes shut against the memory of staring into Hell’s fire and having her soul examined and found deficient. She nearly gagged on her words, “She’s going to kill me.”
Robbie said, “She can’t kill you. She’s nothing but an empty figurehead. Once we take her down, everything will be fine. We’ll be back where we belong.”
Paula started to babble. “I can still hear them crackle as they dried up.”
She heard the exasperation in his voice as he said, “Let me take care of this at my end. You’ve done your part. Do you still have the stone?”
Paula felt a moment of elation. She had forgotten. She cradled the cellphone between her shoulder and ear as she dug into her other pocket. Her fingers grabbed through fabric as her anxiousness ratcheted up to near hysteria. Finally, her index finger dug deep enough to graze the smooth surface. She straightened her legs, dug a little deeper until she had a firmer grasp on the object and then she pulled it out with the glee of a fisherman holding up a hard fought catch. Her smile was genuine and triumphant.
“Yes, I have it.”
The stone was only a few inches long and a half-inch in diameter. It had been carefully polished until it gleamed like black onyx. When Robbie had presented it to her as a gift, Paula had wanted to have it drilled and looped with a fancy chain, but he had cautioned against that idea. The stone was magic and granted protection. He had pointed out the nearly invisible words inscribed in very tiny letters on the surface. Breaking the lettering would dissipate the magic.
Now she turned it over in her hand and held it up like a quarter. She almost said, I feel better, but she didn’t. She saw something s
trange.
She gasped and then moaned softly in her throat. The sound was of defeat.
The shadow by the window didn’t belong. There was nothing there to cast it. Paula wouldn’t have noticed it if it hadn’t moved.
It had a shape.
It had her shape.
“Oh God!”
Robbie was in her ear, but the cellphone had grown too heavy to hold, and it plopped on the floor. Paula descended into blind fear as she tried to escape. Her feet kicked as she tried to gain some traction just so that she could stand.
Paula had never known such fear. It was condensed, true and swept in her heart like hellfire. Just like those eyes that stared at her from the wall. How long, she wondered, had that thing stood there observing and listening. Fear prickled her skin and ran roughshod up her spine in cold tightrope steps.
She reached up for the doorknob and used it to help stand. She remembered the stone and held it out like a badge with one hand as she twisted the knob with the other. Her conviction wavered when the hellfire eyes brightened as the shadow pinched off the wall.
Paula screamed.
She couldn’t stop screaming.
Chapter 7 – Quiet Cages
Harry hated to run, especially through the projects. His foot slipped on a patch of ice and he ended up flailing his arms like a hapless critter in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Not cool, bro, when trampling through cinderblock hell after a druggie suspect.
His partner, Mason Epps, who was closer to the perp than Harry, looked back, saw that he was still surefooted, and flashed him a smile that promised a major heehaw follow-up in the precinct.
Great.
Harry ran harder. The wind swathed his face with cold bitterness as bits of snow slipped into his shoes. He wanted to write the chase off and head back in, but a body had shown up and a snitch had given up the druggie. They had just piled out of the car when that puke, Jerome Bryant, surrounded by a group of guys, had spotted them and took off.
Mason was a tall black guy in a tailored coat, and he was a short Japanese guy. They had zero chance of blending in the Centerfield projects.
How could that skinny druggie run so damn fast?
Harry was losing steam and going by the ground the druggie gained in distancing himself from his partner, he knew that Mason was tapping out too.
Mason looked back again and pointed in a different direction. Harry nodded that he understood. Divide and conquer, right?
Jerome Bryant had chosen a path that didn’t leave him any options. Mason was trying to close in on him, so Harry took the shortcut. He ran down a parallel path and hopped over a small chain-link fence. He couldn’t get beyond being ticked-off that he had to run down a druggie who sprinted like an Olympic runner despite the snow.
To make sure his godawful ordeal was just a little worse, the snowfall started to become brutal. The white stuff didn’t float, it was shooting down like little missiles. He skidded again which only heightened his fury and then he lost them.
Harry stopped, caught his breath, and looked right and then left to get his bearings. The housing development was one huge maze. But he wasn’t completely alone. He saw faces in windows and anonymous threats were shouted down at him from a few onlookers who dared the elements to prop open their windows and curse his existence or threaten to do carnal things to his mother.
Worse, he saw that he had lost his bearings in the chase. Where the hell did they disappear to? He smothered a sick feeling that he had screwed up; that his partner was trapped in an alley being gutted like fish.
Harry couldn’t allow himself the luxury of bona fide dread. He decided to give his search a couple of minutes more before radioing in for backup. In the meantime, he decided to do an about-face and backtrack.
He noticed, aside from the charming shout-outs that colorfully labeled him as someone who slept with dogs, was that Centerfield was too quiet. He couldn’t get past the eerie isolation. After all, the housing project was a sprawling and nondescript collection of second story single family dwellings. It smelled like poverty and looked like hopelessness.
Other times when Harry found himself at any of the housing projects in the city, he could detect wee bits of hope in some of the children as they played on the ballfields or playgrounds. Their dreams hadn’t been scrubbed off their young faces.
What was the shelf life of hope in this environment?
How long could it last in places like Centerfield?
It was little more than cheap brick and cinderblock and interwoven between the stones were swatches of poverty, abuse and desolation.
Today seemed different even in Centerfield. There wasn’t a child in sight. There weren’t any kids playing in the snow? Even the hopelessness in Centerfield tasted differently, but it was pervasive.
The snow was now deep enough to give Harry a good set of tracks. He restarted where he and Mason had first split up. His speed kicked up as a thread of anxiety had him seeing Mason getting ambushed by Jerome and his posse.
Hadn’t the druggie Jerome Bryant knifed his supplier to death, allegedly?
Harry ramped up his search for them into hyper drive. The tracks wove on through a side street and up an alley. Harry knew that alley led to a dead end.
There were only two choices Jerome had. Either he gave it up or he challenged. Mason was a giant at six foot two and a solid two twenty-five, but a well-handled weapon was a great equalizer.
Finally, Harry saw them. Mason and his perp stood side-by-side and both were facing a brick wall. And they were both quiet.
Harry stopped running. His cold toes were numb and dampness reached inside his pants and clawed up his thighs. Breathing heavily, he freed his Glock and aimed it at the druggie. His grip was less than steady.
“Mase? What’s going on?” he asked. He was very aware that his instincts were screaming caution. “You alright, buddy?”
The pair stared intently at a graffiti-covered wall. It was just the side of an apartment, but wide-eyed fright was the only way Harry could describe their expressions. Although Harry didn’t want to take his eyes off the perp, he gave the wall a quick sweep. He only saw graffiti, possibly gang tags and a few crude attempts to depict sexual positions.
Mason’s head jerked as if he’d been slapped. Then procedures resumed as he snapped the bracelets on and started Mirandizing the perp.
Jerome didn’t wake up like Mason. He had junkie written in his sunken skin, haunted eyes and threadbare, dirty clothes. He started sobbing. His grief seemed so genuine that Harry’s initial pissed-off state evaporated.
Harry was used to perps crying because they got caught, and not for being scummy creeps who embezzled or raped or murdered. Harry always thought it was funny, but not in a humorous way, how innocent folks tended to be outraged or embarrassed when apprehended. They often clung to the idea that surely true justice would prevail, etcetera, etcetera. While the guilty ones usually said nothing and lawyered up, or they said too much. Some did boo-hoo for themselves, while others sought to out-slick the stupid policemen.
Harry saw that Jerome was one of those crying perps. As the partners walked him to their car, he talked and sobbed not only about the murder that he had committed earlier that week, but he also tried to verbally wash his soul clean by copping to a few other ones. He oozed details all the way to precinct.
Even when he was thrown into holding, he never stopped crying. Jerome had plenty of company in the cage. It was standing room only. Harry often found it unsettling, how even the churches in the former capitol of the Confederacy stayed basically homogenous, but there was always slightly more diversity in the city jails.
Harry gave the once-over of the raggedy self-proclaimed serial killer. The guy looked like a mealy-mouthed weakling who would draw into his shell like a turtle if the wind pressed too hard.
Harry caught himself from saying something snarky, like, “It’s always the quiet ones.”
Quiet.
The word, and the atmosphere rolled over hi
m like a silent avalanche.
The cage occupants were too quiet especially since the cells were packed, which given the size and temperament of the city, was also a little unusual.
Their eyes were on him, but surprisingly, not their anger. Occasional sobs punctuated the stillness.
Harry was reacquainted with the same edginess he had fleetingly experienced when he’d found Mason and Jerome staring at the wall.
Had he missed something? Had there been more than nonsensical graffiti and inane gang tags on the side of that building? Like maybe a message?
He turned to leave when Jerome piped up after noisily sucking down a nose full of snot. “I told it like she wanted. Is she go still hurt me or is she go let me go?”
Harry didn’t have a right to feel sorry for a confessed killer. He caught Jerome flinching, maybe someone nudged him to keep him quiet. The perp clammed up and dropped his head.
Harry understood. Yeah, yeah, snitches get stitches, but maybe that was what he’d been sensing from this population. Fear.
“You’re afraid of who? What’s her name?”
A voice from the back boomed, “You ´bout to find out, porker, and if you know where that boy is, you’d better tell her that too.”
Harry scanned the faces silently challenging him. “Who said that?”
Someone in an adjoining cell laughed before total quiet reasserted itself. Jerome dropped back and blended into the crowd. Harry lost sight of him. No matter. He would finish up his report and question him later in interrogation. At least, that was what he told himself when deep down he knew that he had to get away. The fear became tangible and gripped him in a stranglehold.
Even though he slowed his swagger -- he didn’t want those bastards to know that he was afraid -- Harry did just that. He escaped.
Stolen Prophet: A Horror Supernatural Thriller (The Prophet's Mother Book 1) Page 5