Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle)

by Nassise, Joseph

  I shook off the feeling. I didn’t know who or what the Preacher actually was—devil, demon, or something worse—but I’d made no bargain as demanding as Faust’s.

  All I had done was promise to carry out a task for him.

  How hard could that be?

  I squared my shoulders and shook off the chill. “All right, a deal’s a deal,” I told him. “What is it you want me to do?”

  The Preacher watched me closely as he said, “I want you to deliver all three pieces of the Clavis Sclerata to me.”

  Whatever I’d been expecting, it was not that. I tried to ignore the kicked-in-the-nuts feeling that washed over me at the sound of that name and did my best to keep my expression the same as I said, “The what?”

  The Preacher cocked his head sideways slightly and said in a voice heavy with anticipation, “Are you refusing to carry out the task?”

  I was about to deliver one of my trademark wiseass replies but the words froze halfway to my lips. Something about his sudden stillness and the peculiar way he asked the question, emphasizing certain words over others, put the hair up on the back of my neck.

  Careful, Hunt, I thought. Almost stepped in it that time.

  “Um … I am NOT refusing the task. I am simply asking for more information.”

  “You know quite well what I’m asking for, Hunt. You can’t play games with me. Get me the Key. If you do not, I will hunt you to the ends of the earth to claim what is mine.”

  Without another word he stepped to the door, opened it, and walked into the darkness outside. By the time I crossed the room he was already out of sight, though where he had gone or how he had done it I didn’t know. No one should be able to move that fast.

  No one.

  It was only when I was back inside, locking the door behind me, that I paused to wonder how the Preacher had gotten inside in the first place. The front door had been locked; I’d made sure of it before going to sleep. A quick check of the windows showed that all of those were sealed too. About the only thing that was out of place was the mirror in the front room; it hung slightly askew from its usual position.

  You’re in California, I reminded myself. Tremors happen all the time. A minor one shifted the position of the mirror, no doubt.

  But even as I headed back to bed, my mind kept returning to that same image over and over again.

  The mirror, hanging on the wall, slightly askew.

  18

  Fuentes didn’t have anything on deck for us the next day, so I used the morning to do a little legwork of my own. I had one of the estate staff drop me off at a local movie theater, ostensibly to see a show, but really just to provide an excuse for being out for the morning. I bought a ticket to the latest Hollywood blockbuster starring Denzel Washington, just in case someone asked for proof, and then found my way to the nearest bus stop with the help of some random strangers.

  The bus took me the rest of the way downtown to my true destination, the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library system.

  I needed to understand more about the situation into which I’d gotten myself. Fuentes and the Preacher were both after the same artifact, the Clavis Scelerata, or the Key of Wickedness, whatever the hell that was, and I was expected to help both of them get their hands on it. It was not a comfortable place to be. I didn’t know why they wanted it or what, exactly, they intended to do with it once they had it. And that was just one aspect of this entire mess. Without thinking about it too much I knew that this was just one small piece of whatever was going on. I had a few pieces of the puzzle, but only a few, and even when taken together they weren’t enough to allow me to understand exactly what was going on. Like a shadow glimpsed beneath the surface of the water, dark and indistinct, I had the sense of something larger and more dangerous looming in the background but that was all. Without more information, I was completely at the mercy of those running the show. I was hoping the library might hold some of the answers I needed.

  I doubted I’d find much on the Key, but I wasn’t here for that anyway. There was more than one way to skin a cat, and I intended to attack the problem from the other direction and see what I could find on this Durante character and his mysterious companion.

  Short of breaking into the library in the dead of night to be able to read the material in complete darkness, there was no way for me to do the research myself. I was going to need some help. I knew I could simply ask the librarian for assistance, but something told me not to go that route. It would be too easy for anyone following in my footsteps to track them down and, given the nature of what I was involved in, would more than likely put them in danger. No, I needed something a bit more circumspect.

  After asking one of my fellow passengers for directions, I got off the bus, unfolded my cane, and made my way down the street to the drugstore on the corner. Once inside I asked a clerk to help me find a package of Sominex, the over-the-counter sleep aid. I had a choice of original or maximum strength, so I chose the latter and then had the clerk add two bottles of Coke to the list.

  Once outside the store, I tore open the package of Sominex and took out three of the tablets. I stuffed the rest of the box into my pocket and then opened one of the bottles of Coke, dropped the tablets inside and waited for them to dissolve before closing the bottle again.

  Now armed with my secret weapon, I went in search of my assistant for the morning.

  In Boston, where I had lived for many years, there were always a few homeless people hanging around outside the public library. This was for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that the library provided access to a restroom and the ability to sit in a comfortable chair and while away the hours of the day in relative peace. If the homeless person didn’t smell too bad and didn’t disturb the other patrons, most of the librarians I’d known over the years had been gracious enough to leave them alone. I was hoping the same would be true here in L.A.

  “Spare some change?” a male voice asked as I made my way up the stairs toward the front entrance.

  I stopped and turned to face the spot where the sound had come from. “Maybe. Can you read?”

  “Course I can read. Do I look stupid?”

  I chose not to make the obvious reply and answered instead, “Maybe we can help each other then. I’ll give you twenty bucks if you come inside and help me find the information I need.”

  “Give me the money first and then I’ll help.”

  I laughed. “Now it’s my turn to ask if I look stupid. I’ll give you the twenty when I’m done with my research. Shouldn’t take more than an hour. What do you say?”

  Ten minutes later we were settled at a table as close to the library’s public computers as I could get without sitting at a terminal of my own. That would come later; first, I needed to get my helper into the right frame of mind, so to speak.

  His name, as it turned out, was Mike. I sent him off to gather the last several issues of the Financial Times and was sitting there enjoying my Coke when he returned. I offered him the other bottle, the one doctored with Sominex, and smiled in satisfaction as I heard him take a long gulp. He sat down in the chair next to mine and asked what to do with the magazine. I directed him to take out the newest edition and read me the table of contents. I indicated three articles I wanted to hear and asked him to start reading those articles aloud to me. He continued to sip at his Coke as he read and it wasn’t long before the combination of dull reading material and the hefty dose of Sominex began to take an effect. As Mike continued to read aloud, he started to yawn every few paragraphs. His reading pace slowed, his words became slurred and, after a few more minutes, he stopped altogether. When the sound of his snoring reached me, I knew he was out.

  That was exactly what I’d been waiting for.

  Bracing myself for the pain, I reached out and stole his sight.

  Pain flared through my head, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been in days past. All the practice over the last few months had made the transition easier, a
nd the sandpaper-on-the-back-of-my-eyeballs feeling faded pretty quickly this time. In less than a minute I was looking out at the world through borrowed eyes.

  The library swam into view around me, muted and faded, like something left too long in the summer sun, but visible nonetheless. I wasn’t concerned; that’s how the world typically appeared when seen through the eyes of a Mundane. My helper was pretty much as I’d pictured him: a thin, middle-aged white guy in cast-off clothing that was desperately in need of a good scrubbing. He needed one too, truth be told. The brilliant white of his sneakers caught my eyes and made me wonder where he had gotten them. Never mind how he managed to keep them so clean.

  I got up, moved over to the nearest computer terminal, and took a seat. I fired up the browser, navigated to Google’s home page, and began looking for information about the men in the photograph. I knew one of them had to be Michael Durante, and it only took a few seconds to confirm that fact by doing an image search on his name. Hundreds of photos of Durante at various media and charity events around the city came up, and it was easy to confirm that Durante was the energetic-looking Italian with his arm around the other man, smiling at the camera, in the photo I’d taken from Durante’s study.

  I began hunting through the other images, looking for one that also captured the second man in my photograph. He was a much more elusive target, and I spent fifteen minutes going through image after image before I found him in one. Unfortunately, his identity was not noted in the write-up that accompanied the photo.

  Turning to a standard Google search, I started hunting down articles about Michael Durante, hoping to learn more about the man and, in the process, discover the identity of the elusive man in my photo.

  MAYORAL CANDIDATE MURDERED was the first link that came up as part of the search results set. Given the conversation I’d overheard between Rivera and Fuentes, never mind the police tape at the mansion the other night, I wasn’t surprised. I clicked the link and began reading.

  The article was from the LA Times and the reporting was pretty straightforward. Michael Durante, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and Los Angeles mayoral candidate had been found tied up and tortured to death in his home in the Hollywood Hills roughly three weeks before I’d arrived in the city.

  There’s one murder the FBI can’t blame me for, I thought.

  Durante had been discovered by his maid when she’d come in on a Monday morning for her usual shift. He’d been bound, gagged, and secured to the bed with nylon rope, the kind found in thousands of hardware stores across the country. The article noted that he’d been stabbed to death after being tortured but didn’t contain any further details. From my prior experience in working with the police, I knew those details had been deliberately withheld from the article in case a suspect tripped up during an interrogation and said something revealing that he or she couldn’t have learned from the local press.

  As the front-runner in the mayor’s race, Durante had had his fair share of political enemies, it seemed. The article detailed his ongoing dispute with the labor unions as well as his divisive immigration policies. Quotes from unnamed police sources familiar with the investigation stated the attack had most likely been politically motivated and that investigators had several good leads which they were currently following. An arrest was expected soon.

  Leaving that article behind, I moved on to several others, including a follow-up written just the week before. All of them pretty much said the same thing: the police hadn’t made any significant progress since the initial leads had come in. They had apparently backed off on their promise of a quick arrest and had settled in for the long, slow grind, it seemed.

  While hunting through the article on the murder investigation, I stumbled on a link to a gossip site that had done a brief exposé on Durante at the height of his campaign. The article included a photograph supposedly taken aboard a private yacht during a function celebrating the announcement of Durante’s candidacy for mayor, and right there in black and white, with his arm around Durante’s shoulders, was my mystery man.

  The gossip rag identified him as Jack Bergman, Durante’s campaign manager and “friend,” and went on to note that there might be a little more than a platonic relationship going on between the two men. I didn’t care about any of that; what the two of them did between themselves was their business, not mine. All that mattered to me was that I now had a name to go with the face. Given the proliferation of information on the Internet today, a name was often all you needed to be able to track somebody down. I was betting that Bergman might be able to shed some light on whatever it was that had been going on between Durante and Fuentes.

  I glanced over at my helper. He had his head on the tabletop, snoring gently. His breathing seemed to be even and regular, which was good; an adverse reaction to Sominex would have scrapped my plans but good.

  Satisfied that all was well in dreamland, I turned back to the computer and did another Google search, this time for Jack Bergman.

  7,760,000 results.

  You have got to be shitting me.

  Adding “L.A.” to the search dropped the results set down to just over four million hits, but that was still far too large a sample to work with. A quick check of Facebook showed a few thousand results there as well, though that shrank to several hundred when adding L.A. to the mix.

  I wasn’t worried; my Googlefu was strong. I went back to my search page and added Michael Durante to the string, putting quotes around the names to get the search to focus on the full name rather than the individual words.

  That did the trick; eighty-seven results was a far more manageable set of possibilities to work through.

  Or so I thought. But half an hour later I was no closer to finding good ole Jack than I’d been when I’d started. The man was Mr. Invisible. No address. No police record. No Facebook or LinkedIn profiles. Just a few casual mentions in articles having to do with Durante and his candidacy but that was all.

  Who the hell was this guy? And where did he go?

  I sat back and gave it some thought. I could probably find him via his driver’s license, but had no way of getting into the department of motor vehicles computer system to carry out a search. Same went for the local utility company. But that did leave me one other avenue.

  Property tax records.

  As in most major cities, information on property owners and the land they occupied was public record. It only took me a few minutes to find the Web site for the assessor’s office of Los Angeles County and from there to look up Jack Bergman.

  There were four Jack Bergmans that owned property within the boundaries of Los Angeles County. I was immediately able to eliminate one due to the fact that the record had the man listed as deceased for more than ten years, which left only three to deal with. Two of them had bought property within the last six months, so I crossed them off the list as well. It was a bit arbitrary, I knew, but they just didn’t feel right, and I had learned to trust my gut at least a little bit in matters like this.

  That left me with only one name.

  John A. Bergman at 402 West Cavalier Drive.

  It was time to pay Jack a visit.

  I gathered my things, tucked the twenty I’d promised my helper into his jacket pocket, and used his sight to help me navigate over to the librarian’s desk. With my sunglasses firmly on my face, I explained that I was blind and asked if she would be kind enough to call me a cab.

  Ten minutes later I was on the 405 headed toward West Cavalier Drive and what I hoped would be some answers.

  * * *

  “You sure this is the place, man?”

  I leaned forward so I could hear the cabbie better through the thick plexiglass window that separated us.

  “402 West Cavalier Drive?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I got the right address an all, I’m jus’ asking if you’re sure this is where you wanted to go. It’s all boarded up and shit.”

  “Boarded up?”

  “Yeah, you know, plywood over the w
indows and two-by-fours nailed over the doorframe? From all the graffiti it looks like it’s been this way for at least a couple of months, maybe more.”

  Damn. Teach me to listen to my gut.

  “I must have the wrong address then. Sorry for the trouble.” I told him to take me back to Fuentes’s place in the Hollywood Hills, which he was more than happy to do.

  “Whatever you say. You’re the boss,” he said, in that cheery voice of his, and suddenly I wanted to hit him. I settled for leaning back in the seat and fuming.

  It had not been a very productive day.

  19

  The sun was going down by the time I made it back to Fuentes’s estate. I had the cabbie drop me off at the main gate and then had a security team member take me back to my bungalow in one of the electric carts kept on hand to make getting around the property easier. I kept the curtains drawn at all times so once inside all I had to do was shut the door behind me to shut out the last of the day’s light. Taking off my sunglasses, I let my eyes adjust to the darkness.

  Roaming around L.A. all day had left me feeling gritty and hungry. I took care of the latter first, calling a local pizza joint and ordering a large pie with everything on it. Once that was handled, I grabbed a change of clothing from the bedroom and headed for the shower.

  I turned the water on and let it heat up for a moment, then stripped and turned to get into the shower. From the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror over the sink.