He felt the presence of somebody behind him and he turned just as he heard his name being spoken aloud. “Vince Walters.”
The man had come from the short hallway in the back, which led to the kitchen and the restrooms. He was big, six foot two and muscular. Mean looking. Wearing faded blue jeans and cowboy boots, his white T-shirt sported the logo from the band White Zombie. A denim sleeveless jacket was draped over his large frame. The man had shoulder length black hair swept back over his face. Both arms were very heavily tattooed and he wore leather biker gloves. His mirror shades made it impossible for Vince to see his eyes.
“You called me here?” Vince asked, staring up at the big man’s impressive form, feeling himself tense up.
“Yes,” the man said. When Vince first laid eyes on him, the man’s features were intense. Now they softened a little bit as the man appraised him through the mirror shades. He cocked a thumb at the window, motioning outside. “Why don’t we go somewhere else and we’ll talk.”
Vince gritted his teeth. “No,” he said. “Whatever you want to say to me, say it now. You wanted me to come here, here I am.”
“Not here,” the man said. “I have my reasons.”
“And I have mine,” Vince snapped. “I’m not going anywhere with you. Now tell me what the fuck you want and—”
The man reached into his pocket. At first Vince thought he was reaching for a gun, but then relaxed as he extracted his wallet. The man flipped it open and rummaged through it. He pulled out a photograph. He held it up for Vince to see.
Vince gasped. There were two children in the photograph, both of them boys. They were sitting on a bench, mugging gap-toothed at the camera. They appeared to be between the ages of six and eight years old. The older boy had short black hair and wore blue cord jeans and a striped shirt. But the most recognizable boy in the photo was the younger one.
It was Vince. At the age of six.
Upon realizing that he was in the photo, Vince immediately placed the older boy seated on the park bench with him. His name was Frank. His parents had been Gladys and Tom, and they’d lived around the corner from Vince and his parents in those dim fog-clouded days when they’d lived in California. Vince remembered he and Frank often played together when both boys’ parents were visiting with each other. Frank had been rough sometimes, but was mostly okay. Vince remembered he’d wanted to be just like him.
The man holding the photo tapped it with one black leather gloved finger and took off his mirror shades. He had brown eyes and now Vince could make out the vague resemblance to the boy in the picture, the boy from his dim childhood. “That’s you and me in that photo, Vince. Our parents used to be friends, we lived around the corner from each other. I’m—”
“You’re Frank,” Vince said, looking at the bigger man with a sense of awe.
“Frank Black,” the man said. He put the photo back in his wallet and shoved it back in his jeans. “No resemblance to the character Lance Henrickson plays on the TV show Millennium.” He cracked a slight grin at the comment, then leveled a serious gaze at Vince. “I’m sorry to intrude on your life like this, old buddy, but I had to. You’re in danger. Serious danger, and we need to talk now.”
VINCE BEGAN TO suspect Frank was serious about the being in danger part when he suggested they exit out the back. Vince agreed—why the hell not? It was only Frank, his old childhood buddy and playmate from a time he’d almost forgotten. He’d popped back into his life to warn Vince that he was in danger, so obviously he had some information on who’d tried to kill him, right? Frank was somebody he could trust. Vince followed the bigger man warily down the short hallway to the rear door of Holly St. Bar and Grill and into the alley.
“Where’s your car?” Frank asked, putting his shades on again.
“Parking lot,” Vince said. He felt awkward standing in the alley in his business attire, especially standing next to the heavily tattooed, swarthy Frank Black.
“Anybody follow you out here?” Frank asked.
“Um, no,” Vince said. “I don’t think so. I tried to make sure of it.”
“Think!” Frank breathed, clenching his teeth. He faced Vince, glaring down at him through the mirror shades, putting him on the spot. “This is serious Vince, deadly—”
“If it’s so serious, why are we—”
“Our lives are in danger, Vince,” Frank turned to him. His face was intense, menacing. His raven hair blew over his shoulders from a slight offshore breeze. “Yours, mine, maybe others. The same people that killed Laura—”
At the words the same people that killed Laura, Vince felt as if a freight train slammed into him. He gasped. “What do you know about my wife!”
“Everything,” Frank said, gritting his teeth. “Now, the longer we stay here arguing about this, the more of a chance we may be spotted. Do you want me to help you or not?”
Vince almost hesitated again, then nodded. “Yes.” He had to know what Frank meant by Laura being murdered.
“Okay.” Frank accepted this easily enough. “Now, let’s go through this again. Were you followed?”
Vince didn’t think he was, and he retraced his thoughts of the drive over. As far as he could tell he hadn’t been followed. He shook his head. “No.”
“Okay.” He looked up and down the alley. “We need to go somewhere quiet where we can talk.”
“We can go to my place,” Vince suggested.
“I wouldn’t mind that, but I don’t think that would be safe,” Frank said, turning back to Vince. “Is there a public park around here?”
Vince tried to think of where the closest public park would be. There was a nice park near his home in Mission Viejo, but that was a good fifteen minute drive down the San Diego Freeway. He had to factor in the time spent away from the office as well; he didn’t want to arouse suspicion by being gone so long. He wracked his brain for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know,” he said.
“Then we’ll find one,” Frank said, stepping into the alley, motioning for Vince to follow him, away from the parking lot. “I parked on the other side of this strip mall. Why don’t we drive around until we find someplace quiet and we’ll talk?”
Vince shrugged and reluctantly followed the big tattooed man down the alley, his heart beating heavy in his chest with impending dread.
Chapter Nine
FRANK BLACK DROVE a car that didn’t fit his image: a dark, four door Saturn sedan. There was a baby seat in the back, positioned in the middle. Frank looked more like the type of guy that would drive something sleek and powerful; a Corvette, a TransAm, a Camaro, a Jaguar. Something sporty and powerful. A Saturn suggested he was a family man; it also eased the tension from Vince. A guy driving a Saturn with a baby-seat in the back wasn’t the kind of guy that was going to lure you somewhere so you could be murdered. Vince was about to ask Frank if he was married and had a kid, but decided not to. He wanted to hear about Laura more than anything.
They drove around Irvine for ten minutes, making small talk as Vince navigated Frank around the city, trying to find someplace they could pull over. Frank didn’t want to talk in a public place like a bar or restaurant, and he was reluctant to go to Vince’s home, and especially his office. Vince thought it was odd that a man that looked like he wouldn’t be afraid of anything could be so nervous and scared about talking to him about Laura and the mystery surrounding his mother’s death. But then his mother had been pretty paranoid in the end, hadn’t she?
For the first five minutes, Vince’s heart raced with nervousness. He still didn’t know what Frank was up to, what his motives were, and he was tense every time the big man moved or said anything. His stomach knotted itself as they drove; Vince had an insane thought that the man was going to drive him out to a remote section of Irvine or Laguna Hills and do something hideous: beat him up, torture and kill him. Why he thought this he hadn’t the slightest idea, but he supposed it had to do with the strange nature in which the man had suddenly stepped back
into his life. Why would you track down a boyhood pal you hadn’t seen in over twenty-five years and then behave real paranoid around him? It didn’t make sense.
Frank checked the rearview mirrors constantly as they drove. Apparently his paranoia wasn’t limited to just Vince being followed.
Vince relaxed more as he realized Frank was following his street directions in finding a quiet spot to pull over. Vince remembered a small park that was near a library and the Town Hall. He directed Frank to it and they drove in silence as the Saturn purred down the suburban streets. It was a nice, warm day. The sky was blue with specks of white fluffy clouds scattered about, and there was a nice offshore breeze blowing from the west. It was probably close to eighty degrees and it was only twelve o’clock. Vince figured he could get away with being away from the office until at least two, so he hoped Frank would tell him what was on his mind so Vince could go about the task of asking his own questions.
They approached MacArthur Boulevard, and Vince directed Frank across the intersection. The park was just ahead of them, to the right. Frank pulled the Saturn into a parking slot away from other cars and killed the engine. Outside, a group of kids played scratch baseball in the open field of the park. To their right a group of women were seated at a picnic table scurrying about like busy bees, unloading baskets of food and talking as children played around them and on the playground. In short, it was a normal summer afternoon in the park.
Frank turned toward Vince, his mirror shades menacing in the closed space. “Okay, I think we’ll be cool here.”
“Nobody followed us?” Vince asked. He felt silly asking, but it seemed like a joke to him. He tried not to let his skepticism creep into his tone of voice.
“No,” Frank said. Then he jumped right into the subject at hand. “Do you remember any part of our childhood?”
“I thought you were going to tell me about my mother?” Vince asked, the cockiness of their earlier encounter at the restaurant creeping in. “And what do you know about Laura being—”
“First things first,” Frank said, holding up one leather clad hand to halt Vince’s flow of questions. “I’ll get to your questions as soon as I can. I promise. Please, just bear with me. How much of our childhood do you remember?”
Vince sighed and backed off from his confrontational stance, realizing it wasn’t going to get him anywhere. Might as well play Frank’s game his way. “I just remember snatches of it.”
“Like what?”
Vince shrugged. “Kindergarten through second grade basically. I remember playing with a bunch of other kids after school. I think you were one of them. There was a little girl with blond hair…our parents were friends with her parents—”
“Nellie,” Frank said. At the mention of that long lost childhood name of the little girl Vince had played with, he felt a sense of nostalgia.
“Yes,” Vince said.
“What else?”
“I remember…” Vince thought hard about this, dredging up long buried memories. “Just various people that used to come by. I don’t remember who they were.”
“Do you remember any names?”
“Just you and Nellie,” Vince said, trying hard to dredge his memory. “I remember a guy named Tom…I think he was your father.”
“He wasn’t my father,” Frank said, almost spitting the words out. “He had a hand in raising me, but he wasn’t my father.”
“I remember an older guy. An Uncle I think.” His searching mind unearthed the name. “Sammy, I think his name was? Uncle Sammy? That sounds weird, but—”
At the mention of Uncle Sammy, Frank turned away from Vince, his hands gripping the steering wheel. He appeared to be visibly affected, as if he’d just heard a set of fingernails being scratched against a chalkboard. “That’s Samuel Garrison,” he said, softly. “Yeah, you got that right. What else?”
Knowing that the mention of Samuel Garrison bothered Frank immensely and wondering why, he plunged on. “There were others, I don’t remember all their names. There was an older couple named Paul and Opal…that’s an old fashioned-sounding name, isn’t? Opal? I remember a black guy, real thin, friendly…a real cool dude. Sharp dresser. I think his name was Bobby. There were a couple of young guys that my dad used to hang out with. Maybe it was my mom’s boyfriend. I’m still not so sure who my dad was . They looked like hippies. A lot of the people that used to come around were kinda hippie like, but they were also respectable. You know, normal looking.”
Frank was nodding. “You remember more than I thought you would then. Much more.”
“I remember you and I used to play together,” Vince continued. “We used to play with Nellie and a couple other kids in my neighborhood. Sometimes there were kids whose parents our folks hung out with. I don’t remember their names.”
“I remember them, too,” Frank said. “I don’t remember names much myself. I had to dredge them up with the help of regression therapy.” He motioned to Vince. “What else?”
Vince shrugged. “Just…it all ended. We moved, and you weren’t around anymore for some reason. I don’t remember why. Or maybe it was you and your folks moved.” He concentrated, trying to remember. “Yeah, I think that’s right. My mother told me you and your folks moved.” He looked at Frank. “Is that right?”
“Pretty much,” Frank said, looking out the window idly, as if he didn’t want to answer Vince’s question. He turned to Vince. “Anything else?”
Vince tried to remember but he couldn’t. The images floated in his mind, intermingling with the dreams: the darkness dream, the dream in which the weird man tried to kill him. They all swirled in his head like a kaleidoscope. He felt weird telling Frank all of this, especially since he barely knew the man, but then it was Frank Black, his childhood friend. There’d been a bond between them twenty-five years ago, almost brotherly like, and despite the long gap of not seeing him he felt he could tell Frank everything. He told Frank a watered down version of his mother suddenly packing him up in the middle of the night and moving back east. He related what he remembered about the drive. “Now that I think back on it, I get the feeling that my mother was running from something out here,” he said. “What she was running from, I don’t know. But I remember how nervous she was during the drive. Her determination to put as many miles down every day, her insistence that we stay in out-of-the-way motels, our changing cars every few states.”
Frank nodded through the narrative as Vince continued. He summed up their arrival in New York, then their move to Toronto, and then the move to Pennsylvania. He left out the stuff about his mother becoming increasingly fanatical in her religious views. He didn’t want to taint Frank’s ears with his theory that he believed mother had skipped California so suddenly because she’d angered some cultish hippies. It was his own pet theory he’d developed in the last day or two and he wanted to see what Frank knew about his mother before he voiced this opinion.
“That’s it. What about you?”
Frank looked out at the park, noting the activity around them. He looked in the rear and side view mirrors, as if checking to see if they were being observed. It made Vince a little uneasy. Then he keyed the ignition to activate the battery and pressed the power window button; it slid down. He turned the ignition off and settled back in his seat, twiddling with the keys. “When you say that you thought I’d moved,” he began, “it isn’t really the whole truth. The truth was, I was taken out of my home and placed in foster care and my parents were jailed for abusing me.”
It didn’t surprise Vince. Maybe it was the air of dysfunction that seemed to permeate around the man. Now that he thought about it, he recalled that Frank’s mother, Gladys, and his stepfather had been pretty strict. He remembered thinking to himself once that he would have hated to live with them. While he never actually saw them physically strike Frank, the implication was always there. Mom used to always say Frank was “a bad kid,” and he certainly remembered the older boy as being sullen and troubled. This new revelation exp
lained it.
Frank took off his shades. His eyes were dark brown and piercing. They were haunted, liquid pools of pain. “What I have to tell you is pretty heavy stuff. It’s…going to sound pretty crazy to you.”
“Nothing sounds too crazy,” Vince said, thinking back on the past week of hell he went through regarding his mother’s death and the attempt on his life.
Frank looked at Vince, then cast his eyes out at the circle of women around the picnic table, as if contemplating how to begin. “Before I was sent to the foster home something really weird happened that…I guess sort of precipitated the beating I received that eventually led to the arrest of my parents. A classmate of mine, a guy I remember quite well named Larry, was with me one day after school. I was in the third grade. We were playing together outside and my dad came home. He was furious that Larry was at the house. I wasn’t supposed to have guests over unless they were what he termed ‘pre-approved’; you and Nellie, kids that were the progeny of our parent’s friends. Kids from the neighborhood or from school were a no-no. He blew his top and began wailing on me. Larry got scared and ran into the house—my house. That neighborhood we lived in, if you remember, consisted of older homes.”
Vince nodded.
Frank continued. “Some of those houses had little basements. Ours was one of them. Larry made his way to the basement where I later found out he stumbled upon a woman’s corpse.”
A sharp intake of breath from Vince. “Jesus,” he said.
“He scrambled back up the stairs and out the back door just as my step-dad was dragging me into the house. He beat me up real bad, and when it was over the police were there. Larry’s folks had called them.” He looked up at Vince. “Guess what they didn’t find?”
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