The Permit

by William B. Scott

  And Officer Loring Malovic had never felt more isolated.

  * *

  HUNTINGTON BEACH, CALIFORNIA

  Detective Brian James and his teenage son, Gary, found seats in the upper tier of a temporary grandstand and settled in to watch the World Surfing Championship finals. An avid surfing fan, Gary had hounded his father into making the long drive from Las Vegas to Huntington Beach.

  Gary had been raised in the desert, but could have passed for a Surf City native. Well-tanned, wearing baggy, wild-patterned, knee-length shorts, a tank top and flip-flops, the handsome blond drew admiring glances and smiles from a steady stream of bikini-clad girls. They unanimously ignored the dumpy old guy with Gary.

  Detective James was hardly enthused about the beach or surfing, but he only had one weekend a month with his son. He was determined to log some serious quality time with Gary, and the kid loved surfing.

  James breathed deeply, relishing cool, salty air — a welcome relief from the Las Vegas furnace. Concealed by wraparound sunglasses and a floppy hat, his eyes tracked the wealth of young, curvaceous girls. California dreamin' indeed!

  Divorced and engulfed by a round-the-clock job with Metro homicide, the detective rarely saw a scantily clad, beautiful woman. Unless she was dead.

  "Awesome! Check the banner, dad!" Gary said, pointing.

  High above the waves, a hundred yards off the crowded beach, a single-engine aircraft was trailing a huge, transparent banner: VEGAS POLICE COVER-UP? R.I.P. ERIKBSTEELE.COM.

  Detective James choked on his Pepsi.

  "Aw, shit!" He threw a glance at his son, but Gary was focused on the next competitor, a bronzed surfer racing a monstrous, foam-flecked wave.

  James turned away, fished a cell phone from his shorts pocket and punched a speed-dial key.

  "Yeah, this is Detective James. Can you route me to Metro public information?"

  He waited, until a duty officer came on-line.

  "I thought somebody oughta know… . I'm down here in Huntington Beach, and I'm looking at one hell of an attack on our department."

  He described the banner, as the airplane made a lazy turn south of the Huntington Pier and reversed direction. Over the next half hour, the aircraft would make several passes parallel to the beach. Ultimately, more than 100,000 surfing-championship spectators, tourists and beach house residents would see that damning banner. Another million or so would see it on national television.

  James stood and craned his neck, searching the crowd. "Yeah, I can see several TV cameras. Ah… .maybe. A bunch of newsies are grouped around a coupla tall guys. … Hell, I don't know! I've never seen the other Steele kid. Doesn't look like the old man, the father that's been on TV in Vegas."

  * *

  LAS VEGAS/METRO HEADQUARTERS

  "Sir, I'm positive the Steeles are responsible for this outrage," Deputy Chief Carly Singer declared. As the senior on-duty Metro officer, she had been notified of Detective James' heads-up call.

  Sheriff Alex Uriah was leaving a campaign rally, when Singer called his private number. Smiling and waving, he hurried to his staff car, bodyguards clearing a path for their boss.

  "Let me get this straight," he demanded. "An airplane is towing a banner over the World Surfing Championships, and the damned thing says something about a police cover-up in Las Vegas?"

  "That's correct, sir."

  "Damn it to hell!" Uriah roared. "What are we doing about it?"

  "Nothing we can do, sir," Carly said. "It's already on three or four channels in Los Angeles, and our local stations are picking it up, as affiliates. If we say anything, we'll just feed the flames."

  Uriah kicked a tire, seething. "Those bastards! Who the hell are these people? Why can't they accept that their son screwed up and got shot? Get over it, assholes!"

  Singer responded with sympathetic agreement and hung up. She reflected on Uriah's impolitic, unspoken addendum: … Like every other Metro victim's family does!

  The incumbent sheriff might not get it, but a thousand nervous police officers, who were more in tune with the community, were acutely aware of a glaring fact: Erik Steele's family had the resources and smarts to destroy Metro.

  More and more, Singer feared, Las Vegas cops were despised by citizens, and no longer untouchable. Steele's killing had plunged Metro into unfamiliar territory, fighting an enemy it could not comprehend and, as the department's oblivious leaders would soon discover, a battle it could not win.

  CHAPTER 21

  GHOSTS

  "For though we live in the world,

  we do not wage war as the world does.

  The weapons we fight with

  are not the weapons of the world.

  On the contrary, they have divine power

  to demolish strongholds."

  2 Corinthians 10:3-4

  COLORADO SPRINGS

  Win awoke to the same dark, mind-numbing realization that arrived with each new day: Erik is gone.

  Around three or four o'clock every morning, he was assaulted by an incessant mind-movie: Erik turning, facing a panicked cop aiming a semiautomatic pistol and screaming. Erik failing to understand Krupa's conflicting commands, thanks to "tanker's ears"—hearing loss attributed to hundreds of hours in an M1A2 combat tank. Trying to decide which of the imbecile's orders to follow. Then being shot to death. All within two seconds.

  Win gave up, slipped from a king-size bed and wandered the darkened house. Would soul-deep sadness that threatened to crush his chest, eat away his stomach and scramble his brain ever ease its grip? How could a father, mother or brother survive such despair?

  He worried about Layna and Kyler getting through this torment without debilitating emotional scars—or worse. Grief-class leaders had warned that the loss of a child could rip a family apart. Win was determined to make sure the Steele clan stuck together.

  But, God, he was tired. Did he have the emotional bandwidth to deal with gargantuan pain that now besieged the Steele family, while also battling an increasingly aggressive, arrogant Las Vegas police force and its intransigent union thugs?

  Dispirited, Win stood at a sliding glass door, staring into silent darkness. Silhouettes of motionless ponderosa pines stretched into a brilliant, star-bejeweled Colorado sky.

  His mind departed from the incessant whys and attacked from a new direction—the left field of doubt: Am I doing what's necessary to guarantee the dolts responsible for killing Erik are held accountable? How do I get the Nevada State Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Justice to launch an independent investigation into Erik's murder? Will Dateline call back, as the reporter had promised? Do we have the right lawyer? Does anybody in America really care that Vegas cops murdered Erik, then blithely covered up their heinous crime, with the overt assistance of Ho's, a $93-billion-a-year Wall Street darling?

  Of course, there were no answers. Win drew a deep, ragged breath and released it slowly, trying to tame random thought-flashes that radiated into the night sky, caromed off the universe's dark matter and reflected back to their source, unresolved.

  He fired a quick prayer skyward, requesting strength and guidance, then waited for the familiar bubble of calm to engulf him. It always did, a treasured assurance from beyond.

  He turned from the night-blackened trees and padded barefoot across a carpeted living room. Light from a neighbor's security lamp reflected off a framed picture, drawing attention to Erik's smiling portrait.

  "Erik, I wish you were here with us."

  But, Dad! I am!

  The message registered in Win's mind, loud and clear. Steele was taken aback, although not surprised. Erik had visited in dreams several times, ethereal certitudes that "all is well over here."

  But Win had never heard a spirit-voice.

  He smiled, relishing the peace of knowing that Erik, indeed, was close. He touched the photo and whispered, "Thanks, son. Love ya."

  * *

  LAS VEGAS

  Captain Mikey Greel was having a much rougher
night. He hadn't slept in weeks. Despite three hefty tumblers of high-proof scotch, and a vigorous romp with the bare-backed woman nuzzling his neck, sleep eluded him. Now he knew why, though, and that revelation had been horrifying.

  It had taken scads of testing, but a young specialist and "protein researcher" at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas had finally diagnosed the deadly illness plaguing Greel: Fatal Familial Insomnia or FFI. The finding had been a death sentence: There was no cure.

  Lying in the dark, listening to his ex-wife, Carly Singer, breathing deeply, Mikey Greel struggled to fully comprehend the doc's frightening predictions. They danced across addled consciousness, a jumble of disconnected info-bites: You'll sweat, as body temperatures gyrate wildly. Confusion. Increasingly clumsy, as you lose coordination. Intensely active twitching and jerking of major muscles. Dementia, as sections of the brain become hollowed out and gray-matter tissue literally burns away. Because you can't sleep, you may become aggressive, high strung, scream as if possessed, hallucinate and laugh uncontrollably. Eventually, you'll die of exhaustion.

  He mentally recapped his questions, but the doctor's macabre answers never changed: "What the hell causes FFI? How did I get it?"

  Well, it's typically hereditary. FFI appears to be related to "mad cow" and "wasting" disease. Maybe you ate some bad beef, venison or elk meat. Similar symptoms frequently occur among cannibals.

  Greel assured the young doc that he did not dine on human flesh, even though he was Metro's homicide division chief!

  "Is there any treatment?"

  Not yet. We really don't know much about FFI, except that it's caused by prions — deformed, mutated proteins. They're unusual, extremely nasty critters that defy classification. Neither bacteria or viruses, they may exhibit characteristics of both. In the lab, heat, chemicals and even radiation don't phase prions. They're virtually indestructible, yet incredibly debilitating to humans. I've seen victims' brain tissue full of holes, gobs of glue-like plaque, and tangled webs of dead protein.

  "How long do I have?"

  Hard to predict. Some victims live for years, but those tend to be younger. Rats I've tested lived about fourteen days, on the average.

  Fourteen days? Now there's a comforting prospect, doc!

  Sweating and shivering, Mikey eased an arm from under Carly's form, sat up and hugged both knees to his chest. He'd never been this damn scared. Not only of dying, but of how he almost certainly would die.

  That glib doctor had either skipped or flunked the bedside-manner class. His descriptions of FFI pre-death were the pant-wetting stuff of Stephen King and Dean Koontz novels: Patients often howl in the night. Twitch themselves into "exhausted nothingness." Feel pain in the knees and numbness in the lips. Become incontinent and nearly blind. Some have to be tied down, near the end. Pain can become excruciating — although we can normally control pain with modern drugs. No worries… .

  * *

  Flying 1,200 feet above Greel's abode, a stealthy Gremlin remotely piloted aircraft initiated a slow orbit. An operator at Groom Lake Air Base, more than 100 miles away, tapped a touch-screen icon, remotely opening a hinged door and extending a ball turret into the airstream, beneath the RPA's sleek nose.

  Swiveling counterclockwise and down, the turret aimed a unique sensor's aperture at Mikey Greel's home. Another tap of the screen, and the operator locked a crosshair on one corner of that building's tiled roof.

  "Auto-track locked-on. Holo armed. Cleared to fire," the operator droned.

  A heavyset Lawhead Corporation scientist double-checked a data matrix on a second touch-screen, tapped an icon marked TLRD WAVEFORM-GREEL and a second marked ACTIVATE, then verified a signal was being transmitted.

  An invisible terahertz-frequency beam shot from the ball turret's flat-faced, sapphire transparency and blasted through the arched roof tiles, two-by-six support trusses, ceiling joists, fiberglass insulation, and gypsum-filled drywall above Mikey Greel's bed. The beam's oval footprint bathed the entire room with bio-static energy. Embedded in it was a unique, supersecret waveform tailored specifically to interact with Greel's DNA.

  * *

  Mikey blinked and gaped in alarm, not trusting his fatigued eyes. A dozen feet away, a bright, translucent figure materialized, hovering above the floor. Man-size, it turned slowly, looked directly at Greel, then drifted toward him. A ghostly square-jawed, barrel-chested image halted over the bed's foot, shimmering and staring at the Metro officer.

  Erik Steele!

  Greel retreated from the apparition, unable to look away. The nebulous phantom drifted closer, one arm extended and a pale-white finger pointing.

  "Your morons killed me, but you covered up my murder, then assassinated my character. I'm coming for you, Mikey," the apparition said, hovering within reach.

  Filled with abject fear, Greel recoiled from the specter, feet pummeling the bedsheets. A low shriek from deep in his throat erupted as an ascending wail.

  "Ahhhhhh!"

  "What?" Carly Singer shouted, snapping awake, eyes sweeping the room. "Mikey! What's the hell's going on?"

  Greel could only point with a trembling digit, eyes bulging, mouth agape. He cowered against the headboard, lips opening and closing noiselessly, the image of a dying fish. An involuntary howl of terror escaped again.

  "What?" Carly shouted, hammering Greel's shoulder. "Mikey! Wake up! You're dreaming!"

  "No! No dream! He's there! Right there! Coming after me!"

  "Mikey! There's nothing there, dammit! You're dreaming!"

  He continued to kick, heels scrubbing the sheets, trying to distance himself from that ominous, disembodied wraith that drifted above the footboard.

  Erik Steele's grim, accusing eyes drilled into Metro's Captain Cover-Up, as if they could read the secrets of his soul.

  "Carly! He's right there! Above the bed!" Greel screamed.

  "Who, Mikey?" Singer demanded. "Nobody's there!"

  "Steele! Erik Steele's ghost! He's threatening me!"

  Greel continued to babble, despite Carly's assurances. She finally slapped his face to wake him up. Greel failed to respond and continued whimpering and pointing, trembling like a terrified child.

  Slowly, the phantom drifted backward, faded and disappeared.

  For several minutes, Greel rambled incoherently, insisting Erik Steele's spirit had hovered over his bed—and threatened him, for God's sake.

  Carly listened skeptically. She hadn't seen a thing, despite Mikey's insistence.

  Later, while dressing, she eyeballed Greel, who sat in bed, arms wrapped around his shins, rocking fore and aft. Her ex-husband was now a foreign being, a frightened, hollow-eyed creature she no longer recognized.

  "Mikey, stop it! You're scaring the bejesus out of me!" she yelled. "You're not sleeping worth a damn, and you look like dog shit.

  "Pull yourself together, or the sheriff's going to dump your ass. He's already wondering if he can depend on you to… you know… handle important business."

  Greel acknowledged neither the warning or her presence. His eyes continued to flick about the room in terror.

  Mikey's gone bat-shit crazy over this stupid Steele shooting, Deputy Chief Carly Singer concluded. Having been married to Greel, she knew his innate strength and cold, black heart better than anybody. Seeing him rapidly deteriorating and, now, absolutely terrified of an imaginary ghost, was tremendously unsettling.

  Maybe it was a woman's intuition, but Carly sensed that Mikey's mental state was symptomatic of a profound unraveling, a pandemic of barely concealed fear and suspicion infecting the entire police department. Metro's hierarchy and airtight system of Las Vegas control was crumbling.

  * *

  In a corner of Greel's bedroom, partially concealed by pleated window coverings, a bug-like micro-air vehicle's tiny electro-optical and audio sensors captured Greel's horror in fish-eyed living color. Infrared imagery fused with low-light-TV video and high-fidelity audio data were multiplexed into a coded beam and transmitted to
the Gremlin circling overhead.

  In turn, encrypted data were fired from the Gremlin to a National Reconnaissance Office spy satellite, then down to a sophisticated ground station at Groom Lake.

  "Alright, that's enough for now. Terminate the bio-static Holo feed," ordered Gray Manor, who was watching Greel in real time at a control room workstation. "Cleared to RTB [Return to Base]."

  "Wow! Greel was one scared-assed puppy!" exclaimed the Gremlin sensor operator. "That pig knows he saw a ghost!

  "But why couldn't his filly see the Holo image?"

  Manor hesitated, but a nod from the rotund scientist, who was securing his Holo system via telemetered commands, assured the Checkmate chief that everybody in the room was cleared for ultrasensitive information.

  Hell, these guys have clearances well above Top Secret-SCI, he thought.

  Even though he'd commanded a joint-service special operations unit that routinely conducted some of America's most classified, covert missions, its levels of secrecy didn't approach that of the "black world." And Groom Lake, Nevada—a sprawling base that, officially, didn't exist—was the Mecca of "black" subculture. The Air Force still refused to acknowledge the remote operating location, and its extra-long runway never appeared on aerial navigation charts.

  "She couldn't see it, because the Holo system's waveform was tailored to only Greel's DNA," Manor explained. "The bio-static signal is designed to interact with a specific section of Greel's brain that registers images. Because the signal was keyed to his DNA, it didn't register in the woman's brain."

  "So… the image wasn't actually visible to either of them?" the sensor operator asked, wrapping up his duties. A pilot next to him activated the Gremlin's autopilot, which would fly the stealthy RPA to its home base.

  "Correct. These bio-static waveforms bypass the optical system and stimulate a human brain's image-processing area. Normally, light reflects off an object, registers on the eye's retina and is converted to signals that travel through the optical nerve to one's brain.