One Plus One (The Millionth Trilogy Book 3)

by Tony Faggioli

  Once past his joy at seeing Efren, Napoleon knew he had to do the unthinkable: ask him to lie.

  “¿Por qué, Tio?”

  “Because, mijo. No one can know that I’m back. Not yet. I’m on a very secret mission. You could put people in danger, do you understand?”

  Efren nodded as he pulled his jersey up to wipe the sweat off his face. “But you’re coming home soon, Tio. Right?”

  “Absolutely,” Napoleon said. “Why is school out, anyway?”

  “Flex schedule. We didn’t even go that long and now we’re off again.”

  “You keepin’ busy?”

  “Yeah. Friday we have a special double header at the park for Cinco de Mayo. First game’s at ten. I wish you could come, Tio.”

  “Okay, jefe, I’ll do my best.”

  An old man was rolling a fruit cart down the cement path that divided the park. A piece of cantaloupe with some chili powder sounded beyond good right now, but Napoleon knew there wasn’t time. Parker was in trouble, and so was Mrs. Fasano. This moment was a gift, but it was one meant to be enjoyed only briefly.

  Efren suddenly got to his knees, leaned over and hugged him. Napoleon could feel the boy’s ribs through his shirt, small and fragile, and cupping the small of his back, Napoleon pulled him close and squeezed him hard. They stayed that way as a breeze swept over them both and Napoleon whispered words of advice to his nephew as his heart swelled: Don’t swing at the outside pitches, stay focused on your grades, tell her how you feel because not knowing is the worst kind of knowing of all.

  “You know, when you disappeared, Tio?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mom started taking us to church. Philomena’s.”

  His sister was never one for religion. Napoleon was genuinely surprised. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Me and Mom? We’ve been lighting candles for you, Tio. I been praying every day, in the morning and the night and at every meal. I even know the Lord’s Prayer now.”

  Napoleon felt his legs going weak. He couldn’t speak.

  “I been asking God to please bring you back… and look! He did, Tio! He did!”

  Napoleon swallowed hard, forcing his Adam’s apple back down his throat. He couldn’t cry. It would freak Efren out for sure. He felt panicked, unsure of what to do or say next.

  “Yes, mijo. He did. And He’ll bring me back again. But I gotta go now, jefe, okay?”

  Efren nodded. As they separated, Napoleon looked one last time into his nephew’s big brown eyes. They were wide-awake with trust and happiness.

  A lady in a white hat was walking her poodle in the distance, negotiating the open space between two kids who’d just finished playing catch with a football. The air and trees seemed to paint the moment in Napoleon’s mind. He messed Efren’s hair and then got up and began to walk away. After a few steps he turned back.

  “Hey, buddy?”

  Efren, who was already jogging back to the basketball court, stopped and turned. “Yeah?”

  “What’s her name?”

  Efren smiled sheepishly. “Catalina.”

  Napoleon smiled and nodded before turning again to leave. He made his way through the trees and out onto the street before he finally lost it and the tears came. Leaning on a light post, he took a few deep breaths, his lungs unable to hold the air properly. Before long he felt a sort of peace come over him, as if he weren’t alone, as if someone were there.

  He didn’t dare, but then he did. “God?” he cried. “It hurts… and I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have promised him that I’d be back. Because what if I’m not?”

  Silence. But it was not a still silence; it was active, alive, aware.

  “Help me to fulfill that promise, Father. Please.”

  A gust of wind rushed over Napoleon in a blanket of comfort, drying his tears as it separated his eyelashes and dried them to his cheeks.

  CHAPTER 7

  MORNING SPREAD LIKE SPILLED orange juice across the blue sky. Tamara had to blink more than once to take it in. She’d cried herself to sleep under the weight of pure exhaustion; her eyes felt swollen and her head hurt.

  She’d experienced the kind of sleep one might expect when someone who wanted to kill and eat you was only ten feet away: light and guarded, a barely-happening sort of sleep that left you weaker than when you first went to lie down. But, still, it was better than nothing.

  Behind the sunrise, the moon was still holding court in the sky, refusing yet to step off the stage of the world. She sighed. What was she going to do? How was she going to survive this?

  She heard him before she saw him. He was jabbing a stick at the fire again, this time trying to bring it back to life, a camping pot over the now weak and desperate embers.

  Seeing her awake, he smiled. “Good morning.”

  She said nothing, because there was nothing to say.

  “That’s it? No ‘hello’? No ‘top of the morning to ya’?” He chuckled, shaking his head. “That’s not very nice now, is it?”

  She tried to speak but her voice was jammed. Clearing her throat she finally replied, “Would it make any difference if I was? Nice, I mean?”

  He looked at her, but somehow, now, amid the light, he did not seem nearly as ominous. Just a man. A skinny man with a mop of dark hair, hallowed cheeks and a week’s worth of beard.

  She pressed. “I mean, does it ever do any good to be kind to your kidnapper?”

  He raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips and gave a quick nod. “No. I suppose not.”

  “You’re going to kill me one way or the other, right?”

  Again, he nodded.

  “So,” Tamara said, gritting her teeth, “why bother with all the pleasantries?”

  He chuckled again and stood up, the legs of his dirty jeans scraping against one another as he did. “Fair enough.”

  Perhaps it was the sunrise, or the fire, but for a split second she was in Bolivia again, a child, with her parents.

  As missionaries they often dealt with the ebb and flow of participants who wanted to hear The Word. Sometimes her father would be preaching it to fifty people, sometimes ten. Her parents told her that it didn’t really matter. The Lord brought to their camp, there on the edge of a meadow that was stamped between their village and the jungle, whomever He knew needed to hear her father’s words, when they needed to hear them. “Tam,” her dad had said one day, “it’s not the count that matters, but the heart that does the counting.”

  It was a frequent refrain of her father’s: the focus on inward perception over outer.

  She looked at the ground, feeling the chains around her wrists grating against the bumper of the car, and wondered silently what her dad would think of this situation.

  Then, quickly, she realized the answer: he would focus on having heart. To endure. To overcome. No question about it.

  Somehow, she had to find the heart to get out of this, for the kids, yes, but the new day brought with it a few rays of brutal honesty. She wanted out for herself too. She wasn’t ready to die yet. She still had a lot of living to do, many things to see and experience before her end.

  She had to find the heart, but also the will. To survive.

  “Not a problem,” she whispered.

  “What was that?” he said tersely.

  “Nothing. Just rambling.”

  He grunted and turned to face her, and she noticed he was wearing a Def Leppard t-shirt. That was an ’80s band, before her time, which made him older than her probably. His shoulder blades were jabbing at the stitching in the shirt and she tried to guess his weight. He was heavier than her, for sure, but not by a whole lot. It wasn’t like she was going to have to face off with Vin Diesel if she got a chance to fight him.

  She wondered if it was okay to pray for the opportunity to kill someone and decided that it probably wasn’t.

  “So what’s for breakfast?” she asked with a yawn, trying to act calm even as she began to shiver a bit against the morning air.

  “Coffee,�
� he said, pointing at the pot, “and I got a bag of Hostess Crumb Donettes over here. But who says you’re getting any?”

  She shrugged. “You’ve kept me alive this long for a reason.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Okay. Then whoever you have to answer to has.”

  “And?”

  “How can I stay alive if you don’t give me any food or water?”

  He squinted at her, hard and cruel. A wave of shivers rolled over her that had nothing to do with the morning air. “You’d be surprised how long you could last,” he said with a sneer.

  She looked away from him, and then reminded herself to have heart, to have will, and looked back. “Okay then. Well. Fuck you too.”

  He gave her a stunned look, and then began to laugh, softly at first, before it grew into a full-blown cackle. “Oh, man. This is gonna be fun!”

  You didn’t have to be a genius to know that knowledge was everything in this situation. Seeing her chance to get some, she took it. “What is?”

  “Your ending. My beginning.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I just don’t know why it’s taking so long to get the command.”

  Tamara set her chin for a second. Shit. He’s a complete wing nut. “Command?”

  He nodded, then suddenly seemed confused, lost almost, in his thoughts. Then, tentatively, almost like a child, he said, “I think it’s a test.”

  Just keep him talking. “A test?”

  “Yes. To see if I’m ready, ya know. For the next step. Do you know what I mean?”

  Tamara shook her head.

  “You regular people don’t realize it but there are some of us in the world… we just choose this path, ya know?”

  “Choose what path?”

  “Evil.”

  A bubble of silence formed between them for a few seconds. She bit her lip, and then popped it. “Really?”

  “You think I’m kidding, don’t you?” he said, smiling again. His teeth were yellow and she noticed that one of his ears was deformed. Seeing her look at it, he reached up to caress it.

  “He was evil too, ya know.”

  “Who?”

  “My dear old dad.” He chuckled. “He did this to my ear, in case you’re wondering, for not taking out the trash.”

  Bit by bit he was revealing things, like a crossword puzzle in faded ink.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, in spite of herself.

  “Oh, don’t be,” he replied with a shrug. “He helped make me the man I am today.”

  She struggled for words, but it was no use, they weren’t coming, so she just waited for him to continue.

  “It was really the only time he ever touched me. Mom drew the line there. Moms usually do,” he said before looking at her in a different light now, a sliver of pity holding firm in the tilt of his eyebrows. “Like you and your kids, ya know? You put up a big fight back there. You sure drew the line, I’ll give you that.”

  She switched gears, knowing that she needed to exploit his pity as quickly as she could, because it probably wouldn’t last long. “So… tell me something.”

  He lifted his chin to her. “Shoot.”

  “My kids. Please tell me you didn’t hurt them before they got away, did you?”

  He looked away, out over to the horizon, before looking back at her. “No.”

  Relief washed over her. “Thank God.”

  Suddenly his face went hard again. Like a rock. “See. You’ve chosen too.”

  “What?”

  “Your puppet master. Your… ‘God .’ You’ve chosen Him over my master, the True Master. Do you understand?”

  Oddly, she did. Who else could a sick bastard like this be serving besides the devil himself? “Yeah. I guess I do.”

  “I see that pretty silver cross around your neck and I promise, I will feed it to you right before the end, okay?”

  His eyes were back to being filled with cruel intent, forcing her to divert her gaze. She noticed a scorpion moving lazily over a boulder behind him. Sadly, in the wrong direction. She felt scared and vulnerable.

  Have heart, you must have heart. Make your stand.

  “Fine,” Tamara said, holding her lower lip in check. “But only if I don’t kill you first, okay?”

  He blinked again and tilted his head to the side, as if studying her. Rubbing his chin with his left hand, he squinted at her. “Wow. Ya know, I’ve had a lot of girls talk tough before, it’s a defense mechanism kinda thing, I think. But they don’t mean it. They’re fronting. I can tell. But you? Hmm. You’re different. Bitch, I think you mean it.”

  Walking over to the fire he pulled open a duffel bag and produced two coffee cups. He whistled softly as he poured them each a cup and then he produced the magic packet of Donettes. Her stomach rumbled at the sight of them as he split the pack open and set three aside for himself before bringing the packet and a coffee cup over to her.

  He fed her the Donettes one by one, lifting the coffee cup up to her lips for each sip, not giving her the chance to throw something hot into his face, whistling the whole time. The coffee was black, and burned her parched throat, but she drank it, the strength of the caffeine offset by the sweetness of the Donettes. She tried to ignore his fingers as he ran them softly over her lower lip or caressed her cheekbones. When she was done he cupped his hand under her chin, lifted it gently and looked at her intently. “You’re special,” he said in a dreamy voice.

  When he stood up to walk away, she noticed something that made her stomach turn.

  He had an erection.

  TRUDY O’HARA WAS ALMOST EXACTLY what Parker expected. He’d grown up in an Irish neighborhood. Be it first generation or fifth, the Irish girls were almost always spitfires. Straight from central casting, Trudy had sharp green eyes and deep-red hair that matched the small spattering of freckles over each cheek.

  She came into the Fasano home hell-bent on getting to the children, with most everyone moving quickly out of her way when she spat Murillo’s name or asked to speak with Captain Bennett.

  Only one poor bastard, a La Canada sheriff with a close-cropped haircut, tried to cut her off and all that got him was a holy fit. Trudy threw her purse to the floor and let loose a deluge of longshoreman-worthy expletives the sheriff was evidently not accustomed to hearing, at least from a woman. He backed up, stunned, and puffed out his chest in some sort of instinctive reassertion of his alpha male status, but it was too late. He’d been demoted down to gamma or some other letter in the Greek alphabet that no one knew about. Parker almost felt sorry for him; the other two sheriffs present would eat him alive at the station later.

  “I want to see the kids, right now!” she yelled, shock and horror from seeing the disarray inside the house still plastered on her face.

  Parker had gone along with a rep from Child Protective Services to a nearby women’s shelter overnight. This morning they’d come back to the house to meet Ms. O’Hara because she had insisted that she knew where a copy of the Fasanos’ will was, naming her as guardian if anything happened to them, and so she could pack up stuff for the kids if that were the case. CPS had thought it a bad idea to bring the kids back into the home, so they were outside in their caseworker’s blue minivan awaiting the outcome.

  The crime scene techs had cordoned off entire sections of the inside of the house before they’d left the day before, so Ms. O’Hara was channeled by yellow tape, plastic sheeting and fate directly towards Parker.

  Taking his life in his hands, Parker decided that he too would try and step in front of her.

  She was fit, about five foot seven, with taut arms. She was wearing black yoga pants, white tennis shoes and a pale blue Nike sweatshirt top that reached to just below her pants. Her jaw dropped as she saw Parker in her way.

  The eye roll to the heavens that followed told Parker he was in for it. She fixed her glare on him and was no doubt just about to explain to him how seriously his life was at risk when he cut her off. “Ms. O’Hara?”

&
nbsp; She paused, took a deep breath and tersely replied, “Yes?”

  “I’m Detective Parker, with the Los Angeles Police Department.”

  “Are you in charge here?”

  “No ma’am, but I—”

  “Then why in the hell am I talking to you?”

  “Listen—”

  “I just took the first flight in from San Francisco this morning; I grabbed a rental and was on the phone the whole way here. Screw this. Where’s Detective Murillo or Captain Bennett? That’s all I want to know and the only people I want to talk to.”

  “The captain’s not here,” Parker said truthfully before he tossed in a little white lie because he wanted her to himself for a bit, “and Detective Murillo is currently unavailable, but I’m allowed to take you to the kids.”

  Body language told you a lot. She took a small step back and put her hands on her hips. “So?”

  “Before I do, I have a few questions to ask though, all required.” Another lie.

  This prompted a small shake of her head as she folded her arms across her chest. “Listen, Detective… what was it again?”

  “Parker.”

  “Parker. Yes. Okay. Let me make this clear. My best friend has been kidnapped or something.” And with that, her voice momentary stuttered, as if she might’ve felt that by saying it she was somehow now risking darker thoughts. It took two seconds, tops, for her to get back her fury. “And her children, who are like my children too, need me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But my ass,” she said, hands back on her hips, but balled up into fists this time. “I’m not answering shit until I see them and know they’re okay. Are. We. Clear?”

  Parker scratched his temple as his will drained out of him. This was cruel, and stupid. What he had to know he could find out later, and the earnest, almost desperate look on her face now was more than he could take. She looked like she was about to cry, and well, when Irish girls cried people were almost guaranteed to get physically hurt, usually bad. Holding up his hands in a “whoa” sort of gesture, he nodded and said, “Follow me.”