Rising Phoenix

by Kyle Mills

  “Are you kidding? Look at me?” Jennifer took off her helmet and held her arms out to give him a better view. She was spattered head to toe in mud. A gash above her knee, suffered on the first downhill of the race, was still oozing blood. And to top it off, her hair had taken on the shape of her helmet.

  Her father didn’t look impressed. “We’ll just tell them you were in a mountain bike race. They’ll understand.”

  She assumed that “they” referred to the ma’tre d’ of a really, really snooty restaurant who would look at her like she was a homeless person and then grudgingly get them a table because her father was the largest car dealer in Arizona.

  Jennifer sighed and walked over to her parent’s Cadillac. Leaning into the open window, she pulled out a small backpack containing a change of underwear, a pair of shorts, and a sweatshirt.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, walking toward a white van with SPECIALIZED painted in red across the side.

  “That work?” Jennifer asked the young man sitting on a lawn chair in front of the van. He put down the hopelessly misshapen wheel he had been contemplating and picked up the end of the hose lying next to him.

  “Sure, Jen. You want to spray off your bike?”

  “My parents want to go out for dinner.”

  He examined her carefully and fished a beer out of the cooler next to his chair. “It’s gonna be pretty cold.”

  She tossed her pack through the window of his van and waved him on. “Do it.”

  “Okay, now I’m ready,” Jennifer said, wearing her clean clothes and drying her hair with a heavily stained towel her friend with the van had loaned her. She bent forward and shook out her damp, unnaturally blond hair. “Hey, Billy. None of this grease is coming off in my hair is it?”

  Her question had the desired effect. Billy looked appalled.

  “Well, I thought it was a very nice dinner.”

  Jennifer rolled her eyes.

  “Watch on the road, honey,” her mother cautioned. “They’ll deduct points on your driver’s test.”

  Jennifer turned the volume of the radio all the way down. “Mom, Billy and I have known each other for our whole lives. He’s a jerk. And he thinks I’m a jerk. My history teacher says that most people faced with a common enemy, in this case you guys, develop at least a teeny bit of a friendship. You’ll notice we haven’t.”

  Her mother’s chins drooped. “They’re such a nice family, I don’t see why you’re so resistant …”

  Jennifer craned her neck and looked at her father who had retreated to the far corner of the back seat. “Help me out here, Dad.”

  He ignored her and continued to peruse the road map lying in his lap, apparently oblivious to the fact that they were a half a mile from home.

  Jennifer turned back before her mother could get on her about her driving again. “Try to follow me here, Mom. Billy likes the cheerleader type. Girls with long red nails who can squeal at just the right pitch when he makes a touchdown. Besides, I have a boyfriend. And he hasn’t been lobotomized.”

  Jennifer flipped on the blinker and turned the car into their driveway. She sped along the winding drive and escaped the car before her mother could start in again.

  As she pulled her bike off the top of the car, she tried to ignore the cold air and her mother’s pouting form walking toward the house. It looked like the guilt was going to get pretty thick tonight.

  Jennifer wheeled her bike through the open garage door behind her parents and leaned it against the wall. “You want me to pull the car in, Mom?” she yelled at the open door that led to the kitchen.

  No answer. She shook her head. Oh, yeah, this was going to be one serious guilt trip,Jennifer thought, as she jogged up a short flight of stairs and stopped at the door. The lights were still off. “Did we blow another fuse? Dad? Do you want me to check the box?”

  “Run, Jennifer!”

  She froze at the sound of her father’s strangled voice. The rhythm and force of her heartbeat increased until she could almost hear it in the silence following her father’s shout.

  She took the last step into the house hesitantly and edged up to the washing machine so she could see into the kitchen. “Dad?”

  It took a moment for her eyes to adjust from the glare of the bare bulbs in the garage to the gloom of the kitchen, but the moonlight streaming though the windows above the sink created enough colorless contrast to see what was happening.

  A man in a dark suit and tie was dragging her mother toward the living room. His hand was clamped over her mouth and his thumb and index finger pinched her nose shut.

  Jennifer resisted the urge to run to her mother and pry the man’s hands from her face. Instead, she retreated, almost falling backward down the steps. When she reached out to steady herself, her eyes finally found her father He was pinned against the kitchen counter by a similarly dressed man. The combination of a thick forearm pressed against his throat and a gun pushed into his cheek had silenced him.

  Everything in her told her to stay and fight, but she knew that would be stupid. There was nothing she could do. She had to go for help.

  She spun around and cleared the stairs leading into the garage in one jump. The keys were still in the car.

  She didn’t see the hand that reached out from behind her father’s toolbench and grabbed her by the back of her sweatshirt, but she did feel the shirt go tight across her chest as her feet skidded out from under her. She would have fallen on her back, except a powerful arm had snaked around her waist. An instant later, the hand that had been wrapped in her sweatshirt moved to her face and clamped over her mouth and nose.

  She thrashed wildly when her air was cut off, surprising her captor with her strength and throwing them both against the wall. She grabbed at his arm, finally getting her fingers behind something that felt like a thick black iron bracelet.

  It was hopeless. Panic and lack of air were making her groggy and she felt herself weakening as she fought back the blank white encroaching on her peripheral vision. It took only a moment for the man to regain his balance and lift her off her feet, robbing her of what little leverage she had.

  Making one last effort, she grabbed for the doorjamb as she was carried into the house. Her strength had left her, though, and her sweaty fingers slid ineffectually across the wall.

  “Stop!”

  Jennifer heard the shout—a woman’s voice—but had no idea where it came from. The fingers around her nose loosened and she felt her feet connect with the ground, though the man’s arm remained tightly around her waist and his hand was still clamped onto her mouth. She took in a deep breath through her nose and felt the oxygenated blood begin to clear her head.

  A woman stepped out from behind the shadow of the refrigerator, prompting the man holding her to loosen his grip a bit more and allow her to take another deep breath as she watched the woman approach.

  She was probably two inches shorter than Jennifer’s five-nine, with a boyish haircut—short and parted on the side. Her skin must have been very pale because it glowed the color of the moonlight bathing the room.

  The woman stopped about a foot away and reached out. Jennifer jerked her head back but it just bounced off the chest of the man holding her.

  “You must be very still and very quiet,” the woman said, running a hand through Jennifer’s hair.

  Jennifer let out a quiet squeal, muffled by the hand still clamped over mouth. She tried to look into the woman’s eyes to see if there was anything there that could tell her what was happening, but they just looked black.

  The woman moved to her right slightly, letting the moonlight hit her fully in the face. “Look at me Jennifer. You will be quiet, won’t you?”

  Her voice was smooth and soft, but her newly illuminated eyes burned with cruelty. Jennifer wanted to scream when the man’s hand slid from her mouth, but she found herself transfixed by the woman’s stare.

  “That’s better,” the woman said, sliding her fingers from Jennifer’s
hair, down her arm and finally closing them tightly around Jennifer’s wrist. “Come with me. There’s something I want you to see.”

  She pulled Jennifer from the arms holding her and toward the living room. Jennifer wanted to break away, to run for help, but she was afraid. Not from the man who had captured her or the ones who had subdued her parents, but from this small, pale woman and what her eyes told Jennifer she was capable of.

  She allowed herself to be led to a small love seat situated on the far wall of the living room. The light was better there, thanks to two skylights and the large windows that surrounded the room.

  Jennifer sat down on the sofa that she had spent so many nights on—watching TV, doing homework, talking on the phone. But now her eyes were locked on her parents and the men holding them at gunpoint on the other end of the room. The woman’s hand slid from her wrist and Jennifer watched her walk through the moonlight to her parents and began speaking quietly to them. Jennifer leaned forward to try and hear what was being said, but a strong hand grasped her shoulder and pulled her back.

  She watched them for what seemed like forever. The shadows made it difficult to read their expressions, but she could see the tension slowly falling from her parents’ bodies. Her father was the first to peel his back off the wall, followed closely by her mother who stepped forward, put her arms around the small woman, and began to sob. The muffled sound coming from her mother’s throat was a strange combination of deep sorrow and joy that Jennifer had only heard once before—when a close family friend had died after a long and painful bout with bone cancer.

  Jennifer relaxed slightly. The cruelty she had seen in the woman’s eyes and that had caused a nauseous feeling of hopelessness to form in the pit of her stomach must have been a trick of light and darkness. Her parents recognized her. Maybe they’d known her for years. Perhaps the woman was afraid, too. Perhaps she was here because she needed their help.

  When the man standing next to her father reached out and offered him his gun, Jennifer let out a deep sigh of relief. Certainly killers and rapists weren’t in the habit of arming their victims. Maybe she and her family were in some kind of danger and these people were here to protect them?

  Her father wiped at his eyes with his sleeve as he took the gun. Jennifer watched as he weighed it uncomfortably, then pointed it at the back of her mother’s head and pulled the trigger.

  For a moment she felt like she was sitting in a dark theater watching a movie. The crack of the pistol, her mother’s body jerking forward, the black fluid momentarily backlit and then silently painting the wall.

  Jennifer threw herself forward; trying to escape the sofa, but the man behind her had anticipated this and jerked her back again. The room started to spin and she felt her stomach tighten into a sickening knot as she struggled against the hands that held her in place.

  “Daddy!” she screamed, as her father tucked the gun under his chin.

  It seemed to pull him from his trance for a moment and he hesitated. “I know this is hard, honey. But you don’t belong just to us. You never belonged just to us.”

  The gun sounded again and the window behind her father cracked from top to bottom, leaving a spider web prism as he collapsed to the ground.

  She felt all the strength go out of her. She slumped forward and turned away from the scene before her. For a moment, it felt as though she had forgotten how to breathe. Her mind seemed to shut down everything as it tried to process what had just happened.

  Her parents had both been only children and her grandparents had been dead for years. In an instant she had gone from being one third of a happy family to being completely alone. It must be a dream. A nightmare. It must be.

  She didn’t see the woman approach, and barely noticed when she knelt in front of her. She saw the dull flash of the syringe in her hand and felt herself being pushed face down into the soft cushions. The woman’s hands slid beneath her stomach, unbuttoned her shorts and pulled them and her underwear down. There was the sharp jab of the needle and an unnatural heat flooding her body. Then there was nothing.

  Except for the odd golf trip to Phoenix, the reality of Arizona just wasn’t living up to the fantasy.

  Mark Beamon unconsciously lifted his feet as his car plowed through a six-inch deep snowdrift that washed up under the chassis and lifted the vehicle off the ground. Fortunately, the drift wasn’t much wider than it was deep and he managed to correct a minor fishtail and keep control.

  “Goddammit!” he said to the empty car. “It’s not supposed to snow in Arizona!”

  He had been the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, ASAC, of the FBI’s Flagstaff office for almost a month. And in that month he’d learned something. It did snow in Arizona. Hell, it blizzarded in Arizona. The pictures he’d seen on TV of a guy sipping a margarita in the shade of a twenty-foot high cactus had probably been taken in California. Or maybe the southern tip of Saudi Arabia. Still, all in all, he had to admit that it wasn’t a bad gig. He finally had his own office and he had some good kids working for him.

  Beamon slowed the car to a crawl and flipped on the interior light. The high-end houses in this Flagstaff neighborhood weren’t visible from the road; hidden by dense pine forests and the four-foot snow banks piled up on either side of the quiet street. According to the directions he’d scribbled on the back of a blank scorecard, though, he wanted to take the next turn.

  He aimed the car at a narrow break in the snow bank to his right and started up a long winding drive. He knew he was in the right place when he crested a small hill and saw the tops of the snow covered trees fading from red to blue and then back again.

  It took only a few moments to come upon the source of the light show—two police cruisers wedged between three unmarked cars in the driveway of a large log home.

  He grabbed a piece of gum from the package sitting next to him on the passenger seat and shoved it in his mouth next to the two in there already. He’d read somewhere that your sense of smell was supposed to go as you got older, but he hadn’t been so lucky. There was something about the stench of day-old blood that made him more nauseous every year. Gum was his latest attempt at a remedy.

  Beamon slid his vehicle to a stop and stepped out, feeling the cold air penetrate his sweater and thin golf pants. He’d come directly from the course; a two-and-a-half hour drive that rose thousands of feet from the mild red desert of Phoenix to the snow covered forests of Flagstaff.

  Beamon waved at two approaching policemen and ducked into the backseat of his car. He pulled out newly purchased bright red goose-down parka and slipped it on.

  At the party celebrating his promotion and transfer to Arizona—and after no less than eight bourbons—he had donned all of his winter clothes at once and performed an elaborate strip tease on his friends dining room table. His wool overcoat had been the first article to be thrown into the cheering crowd. In retrospect probably not such a great idea.

  “Can we help you, sir?” one of the two troopers said, taking a sip from a Styrofoam cup. His next breath came out like thick steam.

  “Maybe.” Beamon held up his right arm, displaying a large yellow price tag hanging from the sleeve of his new jacket. “Either of you guys have some scissors?”

  The cop with the coffee pointed back down the half-mile long driveway. “Sir, this is a police matter. I suggest you get back in your car …”

  “Mark!”

  Chet Michaels danced through a tangle of police line tape as he jogged down the steps of the house. “It’s okay, guys. This is my boss.”

  The two cops mumbled an apology and started back toward their squad car.

  “Sorry to drag you away from your golf game, Mark, but I thought you’d want to see this.”

  At twenty-five, Chet Michaels had come into the Bureau as one of its youngest agents—an honor he’d earned by graduating from college at nineteen and passing his CPA test on the first try. By all reports, he’d also been one hell of an athlete—a wrestler—but it was a tough
mental image to conjuring up. The combination of his bright red hair and the bumper crop of freckles across the bridge of his nose made him look about as threatening as a cantaloupe.

  Beamon took off his plaid golf cap and was going to toss it back into the car, but thought better of it. The sun had dropped behind the mountains and the stars were starting to appear in the deep blue of the sky. It was going to be another cold one.

  “Believe me when I tell you that this is the bright spot in my day, Chet.” Beamon said, motioning toward the house and letting the young agent lead.

  A yellow rope cordoned off the steps climbing to the front door, forcing them to skirt around through a deep snow bank. Beamon was still wearing his white golf spikes—great for traction but a little weak in the warmth department.

  “Don’t think you’re gonna get much in the way of footprints, Chet,” Beamon observed, trying unsuccessfully to stay in the depressions made by the feet of the people that had gone before him. “It hasn’t snowed for a couple of days and it looks like a football team’s run up and down these steps ten times

  “You’re probably right, but we thought we’d bring in some people to look at it anyway.”

  Beamon shrugged and stepped through the front door of the house. It wasn’t much warmer inside than out, so he tucked the price tag into his sleeve and watched Michaels cross the entryway at a slow run and disappear through a set of hand carved double doors to the left.

  All that energy,Beamon thought, shaking his head. He tried to remember the excitement that had gripped him on his first big case, but the feeling was gone. He could recall the details like it was yesterday, filed away in his mind for future reference, but the emotional charge of being twenty-odd years old and out to save the world had shorted out a long time ago.

  Beamon reached into the collar of his sweater and pulled out a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket. They fogged up instantly, so he let them dangle from his hand as he looked around the entryway.