by Jon Land
Johnny Wareagle was walking the streets of New York. He had no precise destination in mind, no specific route to follow. Anyone watching him might be reminded of how a hunting dog circles the woods in search of the right scent.
His sighting of Earvin Early the previous afternoon had brought him face-to-face with failure, a condition he was not used to and disliked intensely. His Sioux heritage counseled that the entire universe was composed of a single interconnected and interdependent chain. Some men’s actions are explicitly tied to those of others, and the responsibilities must be shared. In Wareagle’s mind, this meant that his failure to kill Early twenty years before cast him with a measure of the blame for all those the madmen had subsequently killed. And there had been many—of that, Johnny was sure. He could see it in Early’s yellow eyes even from the distance he’d caught his glimpse of him yesterday.
The morning air grew warmer. The city turned alive.
“Hey, giant. Hey, big giant.”
Johnny stopped and gazed downward at the origin of the voice. The speaker was a one-legged vagrant sitting on the pavement with his single leg crossed beneath him. The cool slate supported his shoulders and helped keep his torso from toppling. From around his neck dangled a handwritten sign that read DISABLED VIETNAM VETERAN. He thrust toward Johnny a Styrofoam cup that still smelled of coffee.
His sunken eyes lost their hopelessness for a moment as Wareagle met his gaze.
“You was there, too. I can tell it for sure, you was there, too!”
Wareagle stared intently at the derelict, and the sight taught him much about Earvin Early. Early, after all, had looked almost the same way yesterday. Johnny knew it was not a disguise. The material, anything physical and thus transitory, bore no meaning for the mad giant. Early lived in his mind, and in his mind anything could happen. The experiment he had subjected himself to while in jail had done something to that mind, turned a man into a monster. But it had been Wareagle’s misjudgment that had set the monster free in the north woods of California twenty years ago.
In the thick forest that night, Earvin Early had survived a tumble over a steep ravine with two arrows stuck in him and had lived to begin a new existence. More than anything else, that new existence concerned Wareagle. Indeed, this hunt wasn’t so much about Early as what he was now a part of—what Johnny had let him become a part of:
Judgment Day …
Early had killed the man who held its secrets, killed the man to protect those secrets. Find him and the next stage of the chain would follow.
Judgment Day had to be stopped.
And Earvin Early was going to help Johnny do it.
Sal Belamo returned the receiver to its cradle and looked disparagingly at Blaine from the chair in the suite’s bedroom. “And you thought a contact of mine coulda been this far off … .”
“Ratansky?”
“According to Illinois prison records, he’s in the Taylorville Correctional Center, all right. Cellblock D, cell twenty-seven. Transferred there from the medium security facility up in Sheridan.”
“Except he’s lying on a slab in the New York City medical examiner’s office. Funny how a dead man can still be serving time in prison.”
“Beats me, boss.”
“I guess I’ll have to go ask him in person.”
“You sure you wanna do this, Indian?”
Wareagle looked up from the small shoulder bag he was packing on the couch in the suite’s living room section. “It is not a question of want, Blainey. It is a question of must.”
“Because you missed this Earvin Early the first time around.”
“And because he is a part of what we are facing now.”
“Early falls off that ridge, survives somehow, and makes his way out. Trail’s cold, Indian. Twenty years cold.”
“The scent will still be there, Blainey.”
“Just stay in touch, Indian.”
“Sorry about your uncle, miss,” Sergeant Bob Hume said compassionately. He looked up from the paperwork on his desk to meet the stare of the young woman seated across from him. Her blue eyes were cold and hard. Hume had seen lots of different looks on the faces of those who only minutes before had positively IDed the remains of loved ones. No two were the same, but Hume had seen few to match this particular gaze. In any case, his job was only to fill in the spaces on the report beneath him with the proper information to allow her to claim possession of the body.
“You were Mr. Ratansky’s niece, then,” Hume said, getting to that line on the requisite form.
“Yes,” Rachel replied. Playing the part of someone older came easy for her; a smartly styled suit, some heavy makeup, and hot-iron tousling of her hair created the effect. She had considered acting more grief-stricken, but rejected that role for fear it would offset her subtle disguise.
“We can release the body once the autopsy report is complete,” the policeman continued.
“Were there any … personal effects?” Rachel raised.
“A few,” Hume told her, noting the small list clipped to the back of the case report. “We can turn them over to you as soon as we’re done here.”
“I’d like a copy of that file,” she requested, eyeing the folder.
Hume fingered it, as if to question if that was what she was talking about. “There’s really nothing—”
“For my own benefit.”
“It’s against procedure.”
Her face softened, just a little. “My father’s a police officer, too. He asked me to—”
“I understand. I’ll make you a copy.”
Hume started to rise to do just that when the young woman’s voice stopped him.
“Sergeant, I was wondering about something else. My uncle always carried a brown leather briefcase with him. He moved around a lot and had gotten in the habit of never letting his most personal papers get too far away from him. I was wondering if something meeting its description might have been found near the scene.”
Hume again scanned the personal property sheet. “Not according to this list. But I’ll be happy to check for you, miss.”
“Thank you.”
“Now, if you’ll just sign here, I’ll go make you a copy of this report … .”
Jacob was waiting for her in the small asphalt park just down the street from the precinct. He noticed her small handbag bulged slightly with new contents.
“Nothing in his personal effects can help us,” Rachel started, taking the seat next to him on the bench.
Jacob’s gaze moved from the bag to her eyes. “Are you certain? Ratansky was very clever. He could have—”
“You didn’t let me finish.”
She extracted a set of crumpled pages from her handbag. “When the sergeant went to make a copy of the report, I grabbed this off his desk.” She handed it to her twin. “It’s the complete police report on the events that followed Ratansky’s murder.”
“What events?”
“Read it.”
Jacob scanned the pages quickly, stopping when he came to the notation of the missing earlobes on the corpses that had disappeared. “They were killed?”
“Keep going.”
Jacob read on through the sketchy details of a shootout that had taken place inside Bloomingdale’s between the two unidentified corpses and at least three additional men. One of these had been identified as a Syrian national with suspected terrorist ties. He, too, was dead. All that the report offered of the other two were general descriptions compiled from terrified witnesses at the scene.
“This makes no sense,” Jacob said when he was finished. “Who are these men? What brought them into battle with the soldiers?” His eyes widened hopefully. “Allies of Ratansky, perhaps. Help we’re not even aware of!”
“Even so, that doesn’t mean he passed the material on to them. And if he did, the fact that they have yet to make contact indicates they are pursuing a different agenda.”
“One that intersects with our own, apparently.”
&nbs
p; “And unknowingly from their perspective.”
“Leaving us with nothing more than their descriptions.”
“A bearded man and a giant Indian,” said Rachel, highlighting the most repeated phrases used by the witnesses trying to describe the mystery men.
“Not much to go on,” Jacob conceded, his youth showing in his disappointment.
“But all we have for now.”
CHAPTER 10
“Karen, what’s gotten into you? Where in God’s name are you?”
Alexander MacFarlane’s voice blared into Karen Raymond’s ear through the receiver of the pay phone in Modesto.
“It doesn’t matter, Alex. And I don’t plan on talking long enough for anyone who might be listening in to find out.”
“What? What are you talking about? I was worried to death last night. I thought someone had kidnapped you. I couldn’t believe it when the guards said you were alone in the car.”
“Not alone. My boys were in the backseat.”
“My God, they could have been hurt … .”
“Or maybe shot, Alex, by men who didn’t want me off your property, out of your sight. Beyond your control.”
“Make sense, Karen!”
She checked her watch, careful not to give MacFarlane enough time to have the call traced. “Not this call. Suffice it to say I’m playing things safe.”
“Last night, Karen, think about what happened last night!”
“I am.”
“Talk to me, Karen! God help me, I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but we’ve got to talk.”
“Soon,” Karen finished, and hung up the phone.
She had abandoned MacFarlane’s Cadillac the night before with the certainty that law enforcement officials all over the state would be watching for it and her. It had taken her twenty minutes to drive ten miles, far enough, she hoped, to give her a sufficient head start. From there she had called six cab companies before finding one willing to make a drive at that time of the night to Sanpee and a trailer park from her past.
Of course, she had no cash to pay the driver and informed him of this fact at the outset, promising to get the money as soon as they reached their destination. The man took another look at her kids, shrugged, and relented.
The drive toward Sanpee took just under a half hour. The boys had drifted off to sleep almost instantly. Every time Karen nearly joined them, a pair of piercing headlights or a horn would jolt her alert. She saw enemies everywhere; around the next turn, hidden on the embankment just up ahead, following in the minivan flaring its high beams into the rearview mirror.
They passed into Sanpee and reached the outskirts of the trailer park just before 4:00 A.M. It looked unchanged, the trailers just where they had been when she had left eight years ago. There weren’t many lights on at this hour, other than the sporadically placed weak floods which the management called security. The cab weaved its way through the mazelike confines toward the rear, Karen straining her eyes through the darkness.
A dog barked. Then another.
The driver hit the brakes. Karen and the boys lurched forward.
“Holy shit,” the driver muttered.
The dogs, all pit bulls, surrounded the cab and barked at it, jumping up and snapping at the tires and grille. The driver instantly closed his window. He turned round toward Karen with fatigue replaced by fear on his face.
“Were you expecting this, lady?”
Before Karen could answer, a familiar voice rang out.
“Looks like we got us some visitors … .”
T.J. Fields stepped into the spill of the cab’s headlights, twelve-gauge shotgun in hand. The white glow shrouded him, and he didn’t as much as blink it back. He was just as big as Karen remembered him, even bigger now in the gut. His hair had grayed and been trimmed much shorter. But besides that, he looked the same as the first night they had met when he saved her from Tom Mitchell’s wrath, right down to the leather chaps, biker buckle boots, and leather vest with the Skulls logo embroidered on its rear. Karen imagined she could hear the chaps creaking as he started forward.
“That’ll be enough, boys,” his stern, powerful voice ordered. Instantly the pit bulls went silent, save for a lingering whine. “Dr. Raymond, I do believe you can come out now.”
“Mom,” started Taylor, wide-eyed, “who is—”
“A friend. Someone who’s gonna help us.”
“That guy’s your friend? You know him?”
Instead of explaining to Taylor that T.J. Fields was his friend as well, Karen simply eased herself over Brandon and out the cab’s door into the night. Two-Ton strode toward the car, the twelve-gauge balanced over his monstrous forearm. The dogs swarmed aimlessly about him, panting and whining. A few bored ones sauntered off.
Karen leaned against the open door.
“Come into the light and lemme take a look at you,” the big man ordered. “Well, ain’t you a sight. Still as pretty as the day is long.”
T.J. eased the twelve-gauge away from him as if it were a toothpick, then opened his arms. Karen took another step forward, and he swallowed her in a tight hug.
“Been too long, girl.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Fuck sorry. Sorry’s for losers. We got lots of people call this home who are just passin’ by.” He moved her away, holding her still at the shoulders. “Not many call themselves ‘doctor,’ though. Some of the boys thought you were the examining kind when I told them you was coming. They forgot.”
“You didn’t.”
“Never forget my friends, doll. We drift apart sometimes, yeah, but getting back together always makes it seem like nothing’s changed.”
“Plenty has. Recently.”
T.J. looked into the backseat at the two boys. “So I gather.”
“I’m in trouble.”
“Sounds familiar. We did this dance before, ’member?”
Karen started to reach into the backseat for Brandon. Taylor slid across the seat after him.
“Can you pay the driver?” she asked T.J. “I had to leave in a hurry.”
T.J. already had pulled a wad of cash from the pocket of his jeans. He wet his finger and began separating the bills, holding them in the hand still helping to cradle the shotgun.
“How much?”
“Thirty-two fifty,” the driver told him.
T.J. pealed off four twenties and handed them to him through the window. “Rest is keep-quiet money. You were never here.”
The driver took a quick glance at the impatient pit bulls. “Never even knew the place existed.” The relief was plain in his voice.
After the driver had swung around and started his cautious exit out, T.J. turned back to Karen. The fading glow off the cab’s brake lights was enough to show the lingering fear in her face.
“You and a bunch of dogs,” she said wryly, holding the sleepy Brandon against her. “I was expecting a bit more.”
T.J. Fields grinned and jammed his thumbs into the corner of his mouth for a high-pitched whistle. Instantly from behind trees, from under, around, and atop trailers, a dozen armed figures appeared in the night.
“This enough for ya?” asked another familiar voice from the darkness.
Karen swung left in search of the speaker and saw an old man step out of the night. “Papa Jack?”
“None other.”
She ran forward and hugged him.
“Easy,” he sighed, “or you’ll be crushing what’s left of my bones.”
Papa Jack, spiritual leader of the Skulls, had claimed to be on the near side of sixty since she had known him. The Korean War had left him with a black patch over his left eye, and a motorcycle accident years later was responsible for the eight steel screws in his right leg. His gray hair was tied back in a ponytail, and his single blue eye regarded her with a hint of amusement.
“Suppose you’ll be wanting your old trailer back.”
“Only if you got the hot water fixed finally.”
“Next o
n my list, babe.” He winked. “A little influence in the right place might speed me up a mite.”
“You’re too fast for me, Papa Jack.”
He seemed to notice Taylor and Brandon for the first time. “These couldn’t be your boys. Please tell me I ain’t gotten that old, babe.”
“They’re mine, Papa Jack. But that doesn’t make you any older than fifty-nine.”
He tugged on his eye patch. “Music to my ears, babe, music to my ears.”
That had been hours before. A brief interlude of relative respite followed before the time came to call Alexander MacFarlane. She had made that call from a phone booth outside a convenience store a few miles from the trailer park. After hanging up, she drove an ancient Ford Galaxy belonging to one of the Skulls another twenty minutes down the road to a second Sanpee convenience store, where she called MacFarlane again on his private line.
“Karen,” he said, without waiting to be sure it was her.
“I’ll meet you, Alex, but it’s got to be on my terms.”
“Karen, let’s talk this out now. I know how you feel … .”
“Then you should be all the more willing to follow my instructions.” Karen had already worked out the logistics in her head, having discussed them with T.J. The Skulls would be her ace in the hole neither MacFarlane nor anyone else could know about. “Torrey Pines State Park. The Overlook, ten P.M. tonight. Park your limousine on the south side of the ranger station. No one else but your driver.”
“I’ll be there, Karen.”
“So will I.”
Blaine McCracken arrived at the minimum security Taylorville Correctional Center in Taylorville, Illinois, for his appointment with the warden a half hour early. The guard inside the front entrance inspected the identification he had produced and looked up from it impressed.
“I’ll call the office and tell them you’re on your way,” he said.
Ten minutes later Blaine was seated in Warden Warren Widmer’s office. Widmer was a surprisingly dapper-looking man with an easy, conciliatory manner who treated every man, inmate or not, with respect. Now he listened to Blaine’s tale of Benjamin Ratansky in utter astonishment.