by Jason Parent
“We?”
“Frank and I. We saw Wainwright slip out, using his followers as shields. The son of a bitch started a whole new religion down here, and all the crazies that follow him are willing to die for him. We chased him back to his church in El Paso. He’s holed up inside. I’m covering the front, and Frank’s got the back, but we’re going in.”
“Bruce, no. You can’t go in. Wait for backup!”
“Backup? Sam, you’ve seen the news. There won’t be any backup. They’re either still in Presidio or dead. And there’s no way in hell I’m letting that monster slip away again.”
“Just wait!” Sam hadn’t realized until then that she was crying. “I can be down there by morning. I’ll call in the cavalry. He’s too dangerous. Who knows what he has waiting for you inside there?”
“Can’t wait, Sam. You know it, I know it, and Frank, God bless him, he knows it. Wainwright will slither away like the snake he is. And there may be innocent people inside. I’m going in. I just wanted you to know in case... in case this doesn’t work out so well, and I need you to pick up the trail.”
Sam raised her arm, a flash of anger overpowering her so quickly that she nearly smashed her phone against the counter before she could check herself. “Don’t be a freakin’ idiot. Wait for help. You’re too smart not to. Is Frank pushing you into this? That arrogant—”
“Sam.”
“I’ll kill him myself if—”
“Sam.”
Her breaths came hot and fast. His voice, calm and quiet, settled her just as it had all those times when she thought she’d screwed up on the job and let some perp walk. He’d never let her fail, had always reassured her she’d done the right thing when she couldn’t be sure of it herself. Even in his worst moments, during his hardest struggles, Bruce had always been there for her. Until that damn Agent Frank Spinney had called with a lead on Wainwright and asked for his help and expertise. He was gone, just like that. Bruce had packed and headed south to settle an old score still ripe as a fresh wound without a second glance at his current partner, the one who was still alive and needed him.
His sigh whistled through the receiver. “Promise me, if this doesn’t end now, you’ll finish it.”
Sam took a deep breath. “Bruce, I’m not—”
“Can you do that for me? This guy needs to pay for what he’s done. Promise me you’ll take him down if I can’t.”
“I wish you’d stop talking like—”
“Enough!” he snapped. But when he spoke again, his anger was gone. “Just promise, will you?”
“Yes, all right!” At that moment, Sam hated her partner. He had no right to put that on her. If he and Frank and a whole squadron of feds couldn’t take down the bastard, what was she supposed to do in their stead? Still, she muttered, “Yes.”
“Thanks, Sam.” Bruce sounded resigned, and she wondered if he knew what he was walking into and what he was asking of her.
She sniffled. “Call me as soon as it’s done, okay?”
“You got it, partner.”
“WHAT ARE YOU THINKING about?”
Frank’s voice snapped Sam’s mind back to the here and now. Seeing Frank had always made her think of Bruce, but lately, memories of him were playing through her head so frequently she felt as though he might be trying to tell her something from the grave. One man’s obsession was another man’s game. Has the winner come back to play a second round?
Frank seemed to think so. He drove them in his black sedan to Forty-Two Dwyer Street, a condemned lot with the foundation of a run-down tenement house. It was the spot where Hector Suarez of the infamous Suarez gang, largely deceased, had exploded into tiny bits just over a month ago.
Every so often, Sam would catch Frank glancing over at her through the corner of his eye, his lips parting as if he wanted to say something, but his tongue could not form the words. Her view out her window kept her somber. Big houses, once homes for single families during the textile city’s heyday, had since been subdivided into smaller and smaller units, bodies crammed into homes like cargo containers packed with refugees. Weedy lawns and broken sidewalks surrounded the tenements, while shady figures lurked in the cracks between buildings.
Sam rested her forehead against the pane and sighed. A bombmaker getting a taste of his own medicine? Even while lamenting the dreary neighborhoods of her city, that thought threatened to put a smile on Sam’s face.
“How do you know he didn’t die in Texas?” she said absently, thinking aloud.
“Wainwright?” Frank’s voice again pulled her out of her reverie. “We never found his body. We saw him go in, but we never saw him inside. The whole thing was a trap. He must have slipped right by us.”
She fixed Frank with a pointed stare. You always said you thought he had help on the inside. But you and Bruce were the only ones there, and Bruce is dead. The uncharitable thought lingered a little longer than she wished, but she eventually dismissed it. Not Frank. He’d always been one of the good guys. Even back when he was too headstrong and pigheaded, he’d always been exasperatingly fixed on doing things right, more so than she’d ever been.
“That blast and the chemical fire incinerated almost everything. You didn’t find much of Bruce either.”
Frank’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing. Sam looked away, content to ride in silence as heat rose in her cheeks. She knew she’d struck him another blow, a hollowness inside her filling with shame.
A few minutes later, Frank’s hand appeared in front of her face, pointing out the window. “We’re here.”
As they pulled up to the curb, Sam eyeballed the mostly vacant lot. The remnants of a foundation had been covered over with boards. A No Trespassing sign stood in a patch of brown grass. Broken bottles littered the sidewalk. They crunched under Sam’s boots as she exited Frank’s car.
“So?” Sam smoothed the wrinkles out of her long overcoat. “What is it you wanted to show me?”
Frank walked onto the crabgrass lawn, ushering her to follow. Though all of the large debris had been cleared, shards of charred wood, some no more than toothpicks but others as big as her forearm, speckled the property.
“There’s nothing here,” Sam said, reluctantly following. “Any evidence of who killed Hector Suarez went up in the explosion.”
“True, but coming back to the scene helps me remember the details. The camera watching us... here.” Frank pointed at nothing, indicating where it had been. “Tripwires... Suarez tied to a chair and rigged to blow.”
“You act as if I don’t believe you.” Sam’s hands dropped to her legs. “Even if I didn’t—and I have no idea why you would think I wouldn’t—Sergeant Montgomery told the same story.”
Frank’s eyes lit up. “But that’s just it. It’s not the first time I told that story. Or at least one pretty damn close to it.”
“What?” Sam’s nostril’s flared as she inhaled. She cringed at its car-exhaust odor. “You mean Wainwright? I thought you said this was connected to that killer club you’re always trying to convince everyone exists.”
“It’s called the Four Pi, and you know that because I’ve tried to convince you at least half a dozen times as well.”
Sam scoffed. “Only every single time I see you, it seems.”
Frank crossed his arms. “You said yourself the Suarez gang must have had someone backing them. I’m telling you, Hector Suarez, Carter Wainwright, the Four Pi—they’re all connected.”
Sam also crossed her arms but added a sneer. “You know, Frank. I’m going to give it to you straight. Maybe if you spent more time trying to catch one killer instead of all of them at once, your career—and my partner—wouldn’t have come to such a dead end.”
Frank’s brow furrowed, and he turned away.
Sam approached. She didn’t know why she was being so harsh. All her dreams and thoughts of Wainwright and Bruce’s death must have been wearing on her, and her patience was thinning. Frank didn’t deserve her hostility—Bruce had known better t
han to go into that church. He shouldn’t have had to die like that. He shouldn’t have had to die at all.
Vision blurring, she put a hand on Frank’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair of me. I guess even after all these years, what happened that day still stings. But Bruce knew what he was doing when he followed you to Texas. He made the call to go in that church. It wasn’t your fault.”
His jaw set, he shot her a reproachful stare. “Look at the facts, Sam. Officer Reynolds was tied to a chair, just like Suarez. He was surrounded by booby traps that, if not for Bruce, I would have set off. When we entered that church, Wainwright had all but vanished into thin air. Reynolds was shot and bleeding out, explosives wrapped around him and wired to blow at the slightest tampering. The comparisons to Suarez are not definitive, but they’re certainly striking.”
Sam tossed her hair out of her eyes, softening as she considered Wainwright’s young victim. “You know, Reynolds works a desk up here now, right? He had nowhere else to go after the El Paso PD laid him off. He got so big after not being able to do anything—after his injuries hindered his ability to sit up straight without pain. The man suffers so much in the line of duty, and El Paso PD drops him like some deformed Spartan baby.” Sam shook her head. “Did you know some of the officers call him Porkins, after the fat pilot in Star Wars?”
Frank gritted his teeth. “If they understood what that man has been through... I have no doubt Wainwright tortured him psychologically as well as physically before leaving him there as bait. If Bruce hadn’t shielded him from the blast—” He cleared his throat, his hands on his hips while his eyes studied empty air. “It was all Reynolds and I could do to get out of there before the whole building collapsed on us.”
“Okay,” Sam said, feeling the need to be somewhat more agreeable to make up for the unnecessarily mean things she’d said. Though they’d been enemies at the outset all those years ago, she knew Frank and Bruce had grown close in their mutual pursuit of evil. In turn, she’d become close with Frank too. She tucked her hair behind her ears and forced herself to give Frank the deference he deserved. “So maybe what happened here is a bit similar to what happened in El Paso. Assuming I accept that Suarez was one of Wainwright’s lackeys—and we both know his terrible skill to cultivate a following—that implicates one man or maybe even one man and his cult. Are you saying Wainwright is the leader of this Four Pi? What evidence do you have that this group and Wainwright are even connected?”
“I don’t know if Wainwright is their leader.” Frank sat on the rotting plywood covering the foundation. The cellar wall only stood ten to twelve inches above the ground, so Frank, tall as he was, folded into an M between his legs, his knees bending near his chest. His lips shrank into a pucker as they shifted over toward his cheek. “I don’t think he is. Rumors about the Four Pi have existed since well before Wainwright was even born. Manson, Berkowitz, and others are linked to the group. Even Stanley Baker, you know—the guy who ate the heart of one of his victims out in Montana—was said to be Four Pi, and that sounds a lot like Wainwright long before he was even old enough to hold his first knife. Whoever they are, they’re well-funded and prefer to keep to the shadows.”
“Still sounds like a fairy tale to me. What would be the purpose of such a group? All I can think of is Blofeld stroking a cat as he thinks up elaborate ways to kill 007.” She smirked. “Do they want to take over the world?”
“As far as I can tell, chaos for chaos’s sake, the total worship of evil.”
Sam smiled goofily, then laughed despite her efforts to hold it back. “Oh, come on!” But her smile shrank under the gravity of Frank’s stare. “You’re serious? Then let me ask you this—if they’re so connected and so well hidden, how would you know if they had anything to do with Suarez’s death?”
“A signature, among other things. A Greek symbol.” Frank pointed to the wooden boards covering the foundation. On it, someone had spray-painted in red something that looked like “Π” four times, making a square in one plywood corner.
Sam traced a smiley face carved into the wood beside it. “Cute. Still, how do you know that’s not the Roman numeral II or—”
Something fast whistled by Sam’s ear as she bent over to take a closer look at the nearest symbol. A golf ball-sized hole appeared in Frank’s car window. She hit the dirt, shouting at him to do the same. Fumbling her gun out of her holster, she aimed it in the direction the shot had come from. A plastic cigar store Indian mask stared back at her from behind a parked car nearly forty yards away. Its wearer aimed a silenced pistol at them.
“It’s him!” She struck the ground as bullets made divots in the dirt ahead of her. “The one who attacked me.”
Frank threw himself over Sam. His chivalry might have been appreciated had she not been readying to fire back. “Get off me!”
“Sorry.” He rolled to his left, taking what little cover he could behind the exposed foundation. More bullets whizzed by them. Their attacker was a terrible shot, but he was bound to get lucky sooner or later.
“We need to find better cover,” Frank said.
Sam glanced over at him, and he must have realized what she was about to do.
Frank’s jaw went slack, and his face turned ashen. “Oh no.”
She pushed off the ground and exploded to her feet, then she charged at the shooter. The masked man fired twice more as she closed the distance between them. His gun clicked empty. He dropped it, shuffled on his feet, then took off running.
“Stop!” Sam sprinted after him. “Police!”
The man ignored her and kept running. Sam dispensed with any additional warnings in favor of saving her breath. Her heart pumping fast, her legs pumping faster, she reveled in the fact that she was gaining on the man, wondering if this could be it—her chance to lay her hands on the man who’d killed her partner too many years ago and so many miles away.
The shooter hopped a fence into someone’s backyard. Sam was on his heels. On the other side, some kind of terrier had latched on to his sweatpants and wouldn’t let go. She reached out to grab him when her sole slipped on what she immediately knew to be dog crap, its freshly broken open aroma accosting her senses. Her leg lunged forward, and though the muscle in her thighs stretched farther than comfortable, she managed to keep her footing. The man, however, had kicked the dog free and was already climbing the opposite fence. Whimpering, the dog paid her little attention as she renewed her pursuit.
The masked had man turned a corner around a tenement up ahead. Sam heard a car honk and hurried after him. She spotted a car idling in the middle of the road as she rounded the house. Across the street, the man was bent over, fingers clutching under his ribs as he caught his breath. His chest heaved as he stared at her through his plastic mask. She darted toward him. Once again, he darted away.
He only made it another block before Sam tackled him into a recycling bin. As she pinned his hand behind his back and cuffed it, the man giggled. Sam furrowed her eyebrows.
He began to sing. “Ten little Indians standing in a line. One toddled home, and then there were nine.”
Like a broken record, he sang only those two lines, repeating them over and over again. It sounded to Sam like it might be a nursery rhyme, but not one she’d ever heard before. As she yanked his other hand back to cuff it, the man’s voice grew louder as he sang.
“Shut. The fuck. Up.” Thoughts of her late partner had already soured her mood far worse than even being shot at could have. When he wouldn't stop, she elbowed him in the back of the head a little harder than intended. His face bounced against the pavement, and he went quiet.
Frank pulled up in his sedan beside her, his window rolled down. If he’d seen what she’d done, he didn’t say anything. Leaving his car idling, he got out and casually strolled over.
“Nice of you to join us,” Sam said, smirking.
“Looks like you have everything under control.” He crouched. The smile vanished from his face. He placed a hand on her shou
lder. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine.” She waved him off.
“Well, let’s turn him over and see who we’ve got.”
Sam’s stomach tingled. The man seemed a little too short and round to be Bruce’s killer, but Wainwright could look vastly different after eight years without a confirmed photo. Together, they rolled the shooter onto his back.
“Shall I do the honors?” Frank pointed at the cracked mask.
“Be my guest.”
Frank tore off the man’s mask and laid it on the ground beside him.
Sam studied their suspect’s face—Caucasian, squat nose, and ruddy cheeks. A big round babyface, the youthfulness of which was amplified by the fact that he was peacefully out cold. “Well?”
Frank frowned. “I’ve never seen this man before in my life.”
CHAPTER 8
As the final bell rang, Michael sighed. One day down. A hundred eighty-four more to go.
He plodded to his locker through a murmuring crowd, the hum like a shallow wave endlessly rolling to shore. Most around him likely felt the same way he did, awkward in their own skins after another day of trying to fit in and of exhaustively being conscious of what others were saying or thinking about them. Everyone could relax just a little with the day finally over, shuffling to the locker rooms, the bus stop, or the parking lot, wanting to forget school but taking with them homework that would not let them.
At his locker, Michael unloaded his backpack, only to stuff it again with all the books he would need to take with him. The last to go into his heavying burden was his worn copy of Moby Dick. He ran his thumb over a plastic sleeve that protected what little remained of its cover. Who names their son Ishmael? He’d gotten as far as that line before goofing off with the new kid. With another sigh, he dropped the book into his pack, zipped it up, then grunted as he threw it over his shoulder.
He closed his locker and turned just in time to see Robbie run by, heading for the locker room.