Bad Karma

by Dave Zeltserman

  Shannon swallowed back what he wanted to say, instead asked, “If I bring her mother here will you let her talk to Kamal?”

  “That is totally up to her.”

  Shannon gave him a hard look. Paveeth smiled pleasantly back at him. “Before I leave here I want to talk to her,” Shannon said.

  “That would satisfy you?”

  “Yeah, I’d say so.”

  “If that is what is needed.” He sighed as he smiled sadly at Shannon. “Let me see if I can persuade her.”

  Paveeth uncrossed his legs and rose effortlessly to his feet. It was almost as if an invisible rope had pulled him up. He stopped to feed a piece of apple to a white cockatoo adorned with yellow head feathers, then picked up a phone sitting on a small decorative table near the cage and asked that Kamal be brought to him. He went back to the cockatoo and took it out of its cage. The bird perched submissively on his arm while he stroked its head feathers. Kissing the bird lightly on its beak, he put it back into the cage.

  There was a knock on the door. It opened and Melissa Cousins walked in. She was barefoot, dressed in a white robe and was even thinner in person than she was in her photo. She was so slight in presence, but still stunningly beautiful with large green eyes and long blond hair that fell halfway down her back. When she first walked into the room and her eyes settled on Shannon, a look of apprehension tugged on her features but as she spotted Paveeth she relaxed into a contented smile. She moved quickly to him, nestling her head against his shoulder. In return he stroked her blond hair in the same manner in which he had stroked the parrot’s head feathers. Turning her to face him, he kissed her forehead.

  “Kamal, my flower, this man does not believe you are here under your own desires. Please enlighten him,” he said.

  She nodded and reluctantly left his side.

  Paveeth waved a hand at Shannon, his fingers long and manicured. “You may talk to her privately, since trust does not seem to be one of your virtues.”

  The door opened and the two stooges from before entered. They both nodded reverentially towards Paveeth, then stood like stone statues until Melissa walked past them, waiting until Shannon followed her out of the room before falling in lockstep behind him. Melissa led them further down the hallway, through a large solarium where thirty or so young and very attractive women in white robes sat and meditated. None of them bothered to look at Shannon as he walked past them. The same incense from the yoga studio burned around them creating a dense fog of smoke which stung Shannon’s eyes. He almost missed Melissa entering a room off to the side. The two stooges accompanying him stared daggers at him until he joined her.

  Melissa sat down on the floor in a lotus position, just as Paveeth had earlier. Apprehension again tugged at her mouth as she stared at Shannon, her large green eyes jumping with fear as they followed him. Shannon took one of the pillows and joined her sitting on the floor.

  “Melissa–”

  “That is not my name,” she interrupted, her voice weak and barely above a whisper.

  “I’m sorry, Kamal. My name is Bill Shannon. Your mother has asked me to help you. She’s here now in Boulder and wants to know that you’re okay. If I bring her here will you see her?”

  “No.”

  “Just for five minutes? It will be right here at True Light. You won’t have to leave–”

  “I said no!”

  “Is there a reason why you won’t see her?”

  “Because I won’t. She is nothing to me anymore. My reason for being now is Vishna. My only purpose is Vishna. Not her!”

  “Kamal, she cares about you deeply…” Shannon stopped himself in mid-sentence. The fight or flight look that had formed over her features stopped him. Muscles along her jaw and mouth had become rigid, and her eyes changed into something that made Shannon think of a feral animal. He considered her for a long moment before taking a deep breath and trying again.

  “Kamal, please,” he said, his tone as soft and nonthreatening as he could manage, “your mother does love you and only wants to know that you are safe and happy. If you’d like I could call her now.”

  Her face became deathly white, her eyes wide as she stared at him. He moved slowly to get his cell phone, and when he had it out of his pocket something in her snapped.

  “No! No! I will not leave Vishna!” she burst out, veins streaking her neck like thin cords of rope. “Nothing will make me leave Vishna!” Then she started screaming ‘No!’ over and over again, her voice rising to a hysterical pitch.

  Curly opened the door to peer in. Melissa, at that moment, scrambled to her feet and ran from the room. He watched her leave, then turned to smirk at Shannon. “Vishna wants to speak to you,” he said, a gleeful maliciousness shining in his eyes.

  Shannon knew it had been hopeless with Melissa the moment he saw how she reacted with Paveeth. Unless he had thrown her over his shoulder and made a run for it, he would’ve had no chance of getting her to see her mother. Still, he couldn’t help feeling lousy about how things turned out. When he was brought back to Paveeth’s sanctuary and saw the smug smile on the cult leader’s face, it took every bit of restraint he had to keep his hands at his side.

  “Are you satisfied now, Mr. Shannon?” Paveeth asked.

  “One girl,” Shannon said. “You can’t let one girl go.”

  “That is not my choice to make. As you have witnessed, Kamal is here of her own free desire.” He paused as he fingered his chin. “I see that you are smiling. Did something I say amuse you?”

  “Not really. I was only wondering why you couldn’t have let me see her the other day.”

  “And why must I bow to the whims of a bully?” Paveeth asked, his dark eyes staring intently at Shannon. His voice had shifted to the same lyrical sing-song he had used over the intercom. “When you came here you were told that Kamal had no desire to speak to you, but you persisted in forcing your way in. And yes, Mr. Shannon, you are a bully. Spiritually, you are a deeply broken individual. One of the many gifts the gods have breathed into me is the ability to see into a person’s soul. What I see in yours is ugliness.” He paused for a moment to smile patronizingly. “I can also see that it is not entirely your fault. It is clear that much violence has been brought early into your life and it has left you spiritually crippled. You can not help what you have become, but if you were willing to put yourself in my hands I could bring you into the lightness that you seek.”

  Shannon applauded. “Not a bad performance. I particularly liked the pitch of your voice. Very hypnotic. Almost put me into a trance. And bravo on using the Internet and doing a background check on me. I guess that’s the least I should expect given your background as a chemical engineer. I’ve got a question for you. Where’d you get the money to pay for all this? I know parrots don’t come cheap, and this is quite a temple of narcissism you’ve built for yourself.”

  A film fell over Paveeth’s eyes. He looked Shannon up and down slowly, then shook his head. “I see that I’m wasting my time with you,” he said, his tone flat, dismissive.

  Shannon applauded some more. “You could look into my soul and see that, huh? Yet another of the gifts the gods have bestowed upon you. Another question. What’s a vessel of the gods doing employing Russian thugs?”

  Paveeth looked away then and clapped his hands sharply. The door flung open and both of his cult-member stooges stormed in, violence flushing their faces as they scanned the room for trouble.

  “He is leaving now,” Paveeth told them. His two followers stepped forward. “Do you want us to throw him out?” the smaller, angrier-looking one asked, his voice a high-pitched squeal.

  Shannon couldn’t help smiling a hard smile. He gestured towards this stooge who looked a bit like a bald Shemp. “A regular ray of sunshine, huh?” Paveeth ignored him and told his two followers, “That is up to him.”

  Shannon’s hard smile turned harder. “Don’t worry, boys. I’m leaving on my own. No reason to get your heads banged up again. Just make sure you keep your
paws off me, okay?”

  He walked past them and out of the room. He didn’t bother turning around—he could hear their breathing behind him as they kept pace. “Quite an arrangement you have here,” Shannon said. “Just the two of you, plus the great all-powerful Vishna, and all these nice-looking girls. Is that how he pays you? He lets you spend quality time with them?”

  “Shut up!” the Curly look-alike barked.

  Shannon passed Paveeth’s marble statue, gave it a short salute, and turned down the hallway of Hindu gods. “Not that I could blame the two of you,” he said. “In the real world neither of you would have a shot with girls like these. But I guess having them brainwashed levels the odds, huh?”

  “I said shut up!”

  “Hey, come on, don’t be so touchy. I’m only trying to figure this out. Of course, it’s not just you two and the almighty Oz. Those Russians who were here the other day, they’re allowed to sample the goods also, right? Let me guess, sometimes they bring friends along?”

  Shannon had walked through the marble foyer and stood waiting for Shemp to unlock the door. Neither cult member bothered to answer him. After he stepped outside, both of them pushed past him in a rush to the gate. Curly’s face was a mask of fury as he unlocked it and swung it open. Shannon was barely past the gate when Curly slammed it shut.

  Shannon turned to face him through the metal posts. “Whatever’s going on in there will come out, and when it does, the situation is going to be flipped around. The boys in prison are going to have the same sort of fun with both of you that you’re having with these girls. Call it karma.”

  The smaller one was nearly epileptic. His hands and face shook visibly and it looked as if it took every ounce of willpower he had to keep from swallowing his tongue. A dark storm brooded over Curly’s round angry face. “We will live our lives in bliss,” he spat out. “Bliss! Under the warm guiding light of the one true source. You, though, will suffer in blind ignorance forever!”

  With that, the two of them hurried back to the house and disappeared within it.

  Shannon stood quietly as he considered Anil Paveeth and the True Light cult. The place was worse than wrong. There was no doubt in his mind that Paveeth was nothing but a narcissistic fraud, and Shannon was convinced that he was using the girls there for something more than just his personal harem. He wondered whether the place could be operating as some sort of exclusive whorehouse. These girls would be different than the typical prostitute, blindly following whatever orders Paveeth gave them. There would be a clientele for that type of slave-like subservience, and maybe that clientele would be well-heeled enough to pay for Paveeth’s temple and all of his excesses. Shannon decided he’d have to watch the place, see who came and went. As remote as the compound was, he’d have to camp out in the open. Paveeth would most likely end up sending his Russian thugs after him to dissuade him. Shannon smiled thinly as he thought about that, the muscles tightening along his jaw. Maybe that would give him a chance to kill two birds with one stone.

  Jesus, he wanted a cigarette badly right then. A tremor shook his hands as he thought about it. He got in his car and sat immobilized. For several minutes all he could think about was lighting up a cigarette and breathing the smoke into his lungs. Deep down in his throat he could almost taste it.

  Then he started laughing bitterly, disgusted with himself.

  It must’ve been the incense. The smell of it must’ve triggered something in him.

  He stared straight ahead and tried to clear the impulse to smoke from his mind. After a minute or so of deep breathing, he felt calmer, the impulse gone.

  He had turned off his cell phone earlier when he entered the True Light compound. He turned it back on and saw he had a message from Maguire wanting to let him know that the second round of photos came off without incident. He got in his car and headed towards downtown. On the way, he called Maguire back.

  “I’m at my condo,” Maguire told him. “Right now I’m printing out the photos. Same number of women left the place as went in. I hung around until three thirty when a black Mercedes 500 SEL pulled up in front and picked up three of the girls from inside. The car windows were too dark for me to get a good picture, but I think the driver was one of the Russians you warned me about.”

  “Any chance you took a picture of the license plate?”

  “Let me check.” The phone on Maguire’s end was put down. A minute later he came back on, his voice more downbeat. “I didn’t get the license. Shit, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be over in fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay, I’ll be waiting.”

  Shannon did a U-turn and headed back to True Light’s compound. He pulled up in front looking for a black Mercedes, but the driveway wrapped around the building. Most likely there was a carport behind the compound, and if there was a Mercedes parked there he’d have no way of knowing it. For all he knew there could’ve been a helicopter pad back there.

  On his way to Maguire’s condo, he called Pauline Cousins at the Best Western and told her that he had talked with Melissa.

  “My daughter is alive then,” she said, her voice faltering and sounding as if she were on the verge of tears.

  “She is and she appears healthy.” Shannon hesitated. “She refuses to see you, though, which is what we should’ve expected. Pauline, I’ve dealt with cults before and this is common.”

  “But she does seem healthy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank God for that,” she said. “What next? How do I get Melissa out of there?”

  “I have an idea of something to try, but you’re going to have to be patient.”

  “What could you possibly try?”

  “It’s probably better if I don’t tell you about it. Please, trust me about this.”

  “But what if it doesn’t work?” she asked. Panic had crept into her voice. “What do I do after that? Do I need to hire someone to kidnap and deprogram her? I’ve found ads for people who do that. Oh God, is that what I need to do?”

  “Right now you need to take a deep breath, try to relax and give me time to see if what I have in mind works.”

  Pauline started sobbing then. Listening to her breaking down brought a knot to his stomach. He didn’t want to tell her that kidnapping Melissa wasn’t even an option—that that only worked when cult members were brought into the public, usually to panhandle for money or recruit new members. With Melissa locked away inside True Light, there would be no way to get to her.

  “At least we know Melissa is alive and healthy,” Pauline conceded when she could, still sniffling heavily, her breathing ragged as she tried to hold back more tears. “At least that’s something.”

  “It is,” Shannon said. “It’s more than we knew yesterday. And keep the faith. I’m not abandoning her. I’m not abandoning you.”

  She told him she would try to, and thanked him for everything he was doing for her and Melissa. “We still haven’t talked about your fee. I’d like to pay you for what you’ve already done.”

  “We can talk about all that later,” Shannon said. “After Melissa is out of there and safe with you.”

  ***

  Maguire was grinning from ear to ear when he greeted Shannon at his door. Perspiration showed on his forehead and neck, his shirt looking soaked around the collar and underarms. “I’ve got some pictures for you,” he said with a wink.

  Bob Segar’s ‘Her Strut’ played in the background. When they got to the living room, Shannon saw that the room had been cleaned up. It still needed work, but the litter had been picked off the floor and trash bags were stacked in a corner. Windows had also been opened to air the place out.

  “You’ve been busy,” Shannon said.

  Maguire’s grin turned self-conscious. “Yeah, well, I decided to turn over a new leaf. And you were right. When I was cleaning up in the kitchen I saw some mouse droppings. I’ll buy traps later.”

  He stopped suddenly, his head cocked to one side as he list
ened to Segar belt out how they love to watch her strut. Then at once he started playing air guitar, his face straining and contorting with the music. He finished his rift with several exaggerated strumming motions and pumped his fist in the air.

  “I love that song,” he said. “Against the Wind might just be the best album of the last twenty-five years.”

  “You’re one of those guys, huh?”

  Maguire gave Shannon a questioning look.

  “Air guitar player,” Shannon explained.

  Maguire laughed at that. “Yep, I’m one of them. Ultimate Frisbee, hackey sack, air guitar, all that stuff. At least I used to be before I started having my life sucked out of me writing code fourteen plus hours a day. But that assignment you gave me today jazzed me right up. To quote a former Patriots head coach, it left me ‘pumped and jacked’.”

  He moved into the kitchen where he opened the refrigerator, took out a beer and held it against his neck to cool himself off. He looked over at Shannon, started to ask if he wanted one, then slapped his forehead. “Doh! Sorry man, forgot. You don’t drink.”

  “Not usually, but I’ll take one.”

  “You sure? I don’t want to cause any trouble.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not an alcoholic. I can handle a beer. Just not the one you’re sweating over.”

  Maguire eyed him suspiciously, but tossed him a can of Guinness. Shannon’s hands shook slightly as he opened it. It had been five years since he’d had a beer, and he found himself wanting it now more than he would’ve guessed. He took several gulps of it, then wiped the foam from his lips with the back of his hand. He craved a cigarette badly. For several seconds he stood paralyzed by the thought of it. He fought back the urge to ask Maguire if he had any, and instead joined him at the kitchen table, leaning to look over the photos.

  “You still haven’t told me what’s so important about a yoga studio,” Maguire said.

  “This one’s run by a cult,” Shannon said. His voice cracked. His mouth had gotten so damn dry. He took a long drink of beer, then pushed the empty can away from him. “They use it to recruit new members.”