Omega Series Box Set 3: Books 8-10

by Blake Banner

  I arrived at the table and sat. Mioko handed me a goblet of wine and I smiled into her beautiful eyes. She smiled back. Jim toasted again, and after that, we must have toasted a hundred times as we ate and drank, doing justice to Jim’s insane, glorious vision of life.

  And as we ate and drank, and even sang songs occasionally, I felt, perhaps for the first time in my life, embraced by the warmth of something real. Absurd as it was, I could not deny it was real. More real, I decided, than the toxic madness that was engulfing the world which we were taught to believe was normal.

  And then it dawned on me: there is no permanent, fixed, immutable reality. As Timmerman had said to me in the train, reality is what we make from one instant to the next, it is the memories with which we dress our experience. No one reality is more real or more valid than the next. What Jim Redbeard had learned to do, what made him wise and powerful, was his ability to create the reality he wanted, and revel in it without shame and without apology.

  I remember then, as the crescent moon rode overhead and then began to slide down toward the sea, as we were rounding off our meal with whiskey, cheese, and succulent dates, Maria sat on Jim’s lap and kissed him. Njal had gone inside to put an original vinyl Led Zeppelin on an old record player, saying something about the greatest of all songs. And as Robert Plant’s voice bellowed out across the night about the Land of Ice and Snow, and the hammer of the gods, Mioko offered me her hand and led me back down the path toward the dancing, wavering fire. There, she slipped off her robe, made me sit on the grass and began to undress me.

  I remember my cell phone chimed, telling me I had received a message. I looked at the screen. It was an un known number. I opened the message as Mioko pulled off my boots. It said: Do you know what you have done? Do you realize the damage you have caused, the destruction that will follow, brother?

  I wrote: It is the light that destroys, Ben. The darkness that preserves.

  Then I switched off the phone and surrendered to Mioko’s delicate, supple beauty.

  BOOK 10

  UNLEASHED

  ONE

  There was no woman in my life.

  I sat on the white sand, looking out at the vast, pale blue sweep of the Gulf of Mexico, with the warm sand on my bare feet, and realized that the thought was an empty, desolate one, but it was also a liberating one. I stood. I had been swimming, and the late afternoon sun was drying the salt in my hair and on my skin. It felt good. I turned and started pushing through the sand toward the big house on stilts that I had rented on the southwestern tip of Galveston Island. My car, an original, matte black, 1968 Mustang Fastback with a modified Zombie 222 under the hood, stood in the shade of the house, waiting for me. I smiled. I was thinking about a cold beer, maybe two, a steak and some margaritas at Pier 32, in Freeport, to while away the evening.

  I pulled on my boots, put the Eagles on the sound system and rolled onto the San Luis Pass Road. The Zombie will accelerate from naught to sixty in one and a half seconds. Forty-five seconds was how long it took me to cover the mile from my house, across the bridge, to San Luis Island. There, I braked hard to take the long curve that follows the bridge, then straightened up and covered the fifteen miles to Freeport in seven minutes. The twin engines are silent, so the only sound was the battering of the wind and the Eagles, telling me to come down from my fences.

  I rolled into the Pier 32 parking lot, climbed out of my car and stood a moment, watching the copper afternoon turn slowly to evening, smiling and feeling good inside for the first time in many months.

  Inside, it was dark by contrast with the sunlight outside. Lee Mathis was singing something about the rain and JD was behind the bar, going a little gray in his long beard and his ponytail, but otherwise unchanged from when I’d first met him, sixteen years ago, when I was sixteen. I leaned on the counter and he ignored me while he polished a glass. Then as he put it down and picked up another, he said, “You’re smiling. What the hell’s wrong?”

  He looked at me then and gave a laugh like a truck running out of gas. I grinned and said, “Give me a brew, and try not to get your beard in it.”

  He pulled a draft into an iced jug and put it in front of me. “I’m serious. You ain’t showed up around here for more than ten years? Then you show up out of the blue, for the last two weeks you hardly said a damn word and I ain’t seen you smile once. Now today, you come in with a big, stupid grin on your face. What happened? You got laid?”

  “Long story, JD. But you’re right. I’m feeling better today.”

  “The ocean’ll do that for a man. I been meaning to ask you, how’re your dad and your brother?”

  “Both dead.”

  He didn’t react, just kept polishing the glasses. “Sorry to hear that.” After a bit, he smiled without looking at me. “I remember…” He shook his head and laughed, “You was a real son of a bitch. What was you? Sixteen? Seventeen? You’d come in here with the money you stole from your dad’s wallet, ‘Come on, JD, gimme a beer. It’s my birthday. I’m twenty-one.’” He gave his slow, spasmodic laugh again and pointed at me. “‘And gimme a whiskey chaser, too. What’s your best whiskey, JD?’ You remember that?”

  “Yeah, I remember. I also remember you served it to me.”

  “If you’d been my son, I would have whipped your ass. I’d a been proud of you, but I’d still’ve whipped your ass. But you wasn’t my son, so I wasn’t gonna turn away good money. Also, it made me laugh when your dad came in lookin’ for ya. ‘Have you seen my son? Has he been in here?’”

  I smiled. “You told him if his son wasn’t twenty-one, he hadn’t been in here, ’cause you wouldn’t ‘countenance no underage drinkin’ in your establishment.’”

  We both laughed.

  “You used to come most every year, at least twice.”

  “May and November. We used to rent a house from the Colonel. Don’t know what his real name was, we just called him the Colonel.”

  “Harry Burgess. Used to be in the air force. He owns a lot of property ’round here. He was a friend of your dad’s. They were pretty tight.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been avoiding him. Guess I’ll have to say hello at some point.”

  “Well, now’s your chance, Lack. He’s comin’ in later to have dinner. He’s booked a table.” He gave his head a little twist. “I ain’t one to gossip, but there’s somethin’ going on with that old goat. He’s been hangin’ around with some chick, ’bout half his age. Fine lookin’, too.”

  A small crowd came in and I told him when the kitchen opened, I’d have a steak and fries out on the terrace. He went to serve his customers and I strolled onto the deck, where they had tables set for dining overlooking the water and the wooden piers, and, about a mile away, the vast, blue sweep of the Gulf.

  The sun set slowly behind me. I had another beer and watched the sky turn from blue to pink to dark, and then the stars pierced the darkness. JD had set up some flaming torches along the wooden railings, and as the night closed in, they lit up, casting a warm, wavering, amber light over the tables.

  By that time, the terrace had filled up and a couple of young waitresses were serving the tables. One of them brought me my steak and a fresh beer, and as I was cutting into the meat, I heard a voice I hadn’t heard since I was a kid.

  “Well, I’ll be doggone! If it ain’t Lacklan Walker, as I live and breathe! You used to be a skinny kid. What happened to you?”

  It was the Colonel. He had aged in the years I hadn’t seen him. He had lost a lot of hair and what he had left was gray, but at sixty-something, he still looked strong and vigorous. He was standing, staring, smiling, with a young woman in jeans and a white blouse by his side. She must have been in her late twenties, slim, but with a generous feminine figure. Her hair was dark and cut short, and though she wasn’t beautiful, her full lips and large eyes made prettiness something extreme. She was very attractive. I stood and moved around the table. We shook and he embraced me.

  “God darn! You’ve grown into a man! Le
t me look atcha!” He stood back and held me by the shoulder. “How long’s it been?”

  “Too long.” I gestured at my table. “I know you’ve come for dinner, you’re welcome to join me.”

  His face said he was pleased at the invitation. He turned to the woman he was with and said, “Well, we’d love to, wouldn’t we, honey? This is…” He hesitated a moment. “This is Emily, my… um…”

  I took her hand and we shook while he mumbled something. “I’m Lacklan. We used to rent a holiday home from the Colonel a few years back.”

  Her smile was as warm and pretty as the rest of her. She gave a small, nervous laugh and said, “ Hi…”

  We sat, and after a brief, awkward silence the Colonel said, “I was sorry to hear about your daddy.”

  I nodded. “Yeah.” Then I shrugged. “You ride with the Devil, you get burned sooner or later.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about that, but I do know he had a nose for makin’ money!” He laughed. “I’ve missed his advice in the last few years, I can tell you that! We’re doin’ OK, real estate is always solid, you know that, but the closure of the factory was a blow.”

  My interest was more polite than real, but it was good to talk to an old, familiar face, so I asked, “What factory is that?”

  Emily gave a small laugh. “It wasn’t a factory, Harry.”

  He shrugged. “What do I know? Whatever the hell it was. QPS. They leased a property of mine out near Chenango, eighty-two acres, gave me a nice return each year, I can tell you.”

  “They closed down?”

  “Big market crash few months back? Hit them real hard.”

  Suddenly, I was interested.[11] “A software company?”

  “Yup. Parent company was a solid American enterprise, but they sold out to a European firm. ’Parently, funding dried up all of a sudden and they went belly up. But tell me ’bout you.” He frowned. “Your daddy said you was in the English army?”

  “I was ten years with the Special Air Service. I left a couple of years ago, with the rank of captain.”

  It was Emily who answered. She looked curious. “The SAS? That’s an elite special forces unit, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  Her cheeks colored. “Wow, I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be. It was something I happened to be good at, but I am not proud of it.”

  It was the Colonel who answered. “Don’t sell yourself short, boy! And don’t sell your regiment short. Ain’t nobody stupid enough to pretend war is a good thing. But there’s plenty who are stupid enough to believe we can get by without an army. You show me a world where there ain’t no Putin, no Kim Jong-un, no ayatollahs and no Islam, and I will consider the possibility that we could do without men like you and me. You know what hell is, Lacklan? Hell is a world where good men stop fighting for what’s right an’ just.” He turned to Emily, who was giving me a very disturbing smile. “Am I right?”

  “I’m afraid you are.”

  I noticed she had no accent. She could as easily have been an educated New Yorker as an educated Californian, or from Iowa. She was hard to pin down.

  They had obviously ordered before coming out, because a waitress brought them a couple of steaks, a bottle of wine and two glasses. As he poured and they started to eat, I smiled at her, then at the Colonel, and asked, “So, how do you two know each other, if that’s not being nosy?”

  He froze halfway through cutting his steak and I saw his cheeks color.

  She smiled back at me and put her hand on his shoulder. “Harry is my father.”

  I stared at him for a moment and grinned. “I had no idea you had children, Colonel.”

  “Well, neither did I, to tell you the truth, Son.”

  Emily laughed. “Harry was stationed at McGuire Airforce Base, in New Jersey. My mother lived in Trenton…”

  He scowled at his plate like it was being unreasonable in some way, by sitting there with food on it. “I told her to come back to Texas with me. She didn’t want to. And never did tell me she was pregnant. I had no idea I had a child, or I would’a done the right thing.”

  Emily shrugged as she poked a piece of steak in her mouth. “Mom died a couple of years back and, going through all her stuff, I found photographs and letters and all kinds of stuff she had never shown me. And among it all, I found a letter to Harry that she had never posted, in which she told him he had, ‘a beautiful little girl!’” She laughed prettily. “So I came out here to meet my daddy.”

  The Colonel had a big, stupid grin on his face. “Happiest day of my life.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “And that was two years ago?”

  She nodded. “Two years ago last month.”

  I raised both eyebrows. “So you just stayed?”

  She laughed again and gave his arm a hug. “We got on so well, didn’t we? It was like we’d known each other all our lives. So I decided to stay and make up for lost time. I sold the house in Trenton, got myself a place here and I’ve been looking for a job—not as hard as I should—but sometimes Harry lets me help him, don’t you, Daddy?”

  She gave him a kiss on the head. He seemed to swell. “She’s a great help to me, Lacklan. As long as I’m around, she don’t need to worry about a thing.”

  I glanced at her and a shadow seemed to pass across her eyes; for a moment, her smile seemed strained. It was so brief, I wondered if I had imagined it. I said, “It’s a big change, from Trenton to Freeport.”

  “And a very welcome one. Tell me, Lacklan, will you be staying?”

  “For a time.”

  The Colonel grinned. “Say! You kids should get together some time! Go out and do stuff!”

  It caught me off guard and I think I just sat and blinked at him for a while, but Emily beamed. “Well, that would be marvelous! We could go swimming! You have the best beaches where you are, or we could go to the races in Chenango! Harry never has time to do anything, do you? And I do get bored sometimes!”

  There was a hot twist in my gut I could only describe as fear. I had a momentary flashback of sitting outside my house just a few hours earlier, realizing I felt good about having no woman in my life. All I could do was nod a lot, lick my lips and make vaguely positive noises. She didn’t seem to notice, but plowed right on and arranged a picnic on the beach, a day at the track and a day of sightseeing in Houston.

  We finished our meal and she was still talking. The waitress came and took our empty plates away. The Colonel and Emily ordered a couple of rum and Cokes and I had an Irish whiskey straight up and a black coffee. All the while, I was thinking about how I could get out of the engagements she had arranged. My instinct was to be blunt, but she was a nice kid and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, or upset the Colonel.

  While they talked, I sipped my whiskey and decided to make some vague excuse about being tied up for the next few days. But as I drew breath to speak, she looked me straight in the eye and said, “Your house is the first one over the bridge, isn’t it? On its own there, on the beach, with the blue roof.”

  “Yup.”

  She winked at me. “Well, don’t go straying too far, Mister, I’ll be dropping in on you one of these days for a day of bathing and barbecue.”

  With no fixed dates to avoid, all I could do was say that would be great and I was looking forward to it.

  “But I’d better be getting home now. It was great seeing you again, Colonel, and really nice meeting you, Emily. You know where I am.”

  She winked again. “Sure do. Gotcha pinned.”

  I stood and the Colonel got up and gave me a big hug and a pounding on my back. She rose too and gave me a kiss on the cheek, for just a little too long. I left them on the terrace, waving to me, and made my way through the bar and into the parking lot.

  I drove back slowly, listening to the surf and watching a fat moon suspended over the ocean, touching everything with yellowy light. I crossed the bridge, left the Zombie among the big stilts under the house, and climbed the wooden stairs to the vera
nda. There were two large, plate-glass sliding doors that gave access to the living room. I slid them open, switched on a single lamp and carried a bottle of Bushmills and a glass out to the big terrace. There I sat in the rocking chair, with the table by my side, looking at the immense ocean under the moon and thinking about the Colonel and Emily. I decided she had some kind of story. However happy she might have been to connect with her dad, she must already have been willing to let go of her past and her childhood. There could not have been much left for her in Trenton to give it up that easily.

  Then I decided that whatever her story was, I didn’t want to know about it. She was pretty, cute, hot as a jalapeno pepper, and had trouble written large all over her. Plus I had found my freedom at last, had just started enjoying it that afternoon. I was not going to get involved.

  Period.

  That was when I heard the whine of a slowing car, heard it pull in under the house and stop, saw the headlamps making long, black shadows of the stilts across the white sand, heard a single car door slam, and feet climbed the wooden steps up to my terrace, my home, my refuge.

  Two

  Her white blouse was faintly luminous in the moonlight. It made her look like a ghost, standing on the deck at the top of the stairs, watching me in silence. I sipped my whiskey and felt unreasonably irritated. The surf sighed on the beach and the breeze moved her hair slightly. It was hard to make out the expression on her face, and when she spoke, her voice was unexpectedly loud.

  “Please don’t think me forward.”

  I repressed my irritation and said, “Sure, sit down. You want a drink?”

  She gave a small laugh. “I think I need one.”

  “Rum and Coke?” She didn’t say anything, but I thought I saw her nod. I stood and said, “Grab a seat.”

  I went inside, found a tall glass and filled it with ice, then half filled it with rum and topped it up with coke and a slice of lemon. I carried it out to her. She was sitting on the edge of her chair with her hands clasped between her knees. I handed her the drink and sat in the rocker.