Whistler's Angel (The Bannerman Series)

by Maxim, John R.

  405

  405

  WHISTLER’S

  ANGEL

  BY

  JOHN R. MAXIM

  ONE

  A year ago, Whistler would not have imagined that he could get used to such a life. Living on a yacht. Island-hopping as he pleased. No problem more serious than the odd balky instrument. No threat more worrisome than approaching bad weather.

  It would have seemed more like the waste of a life for a man only in his mid-thirties. And for him, in particular, it would have seemed near suicidal. Yachts move, but not quickly. They are nakedly vulnerable. Whistler, himself, had once sunk, with all hands, a yacht twice the size of his own.

  But that time, that whole world, now seemed very far away. That life no longer existed for him because Claudia had given him a new one. She was young, she was warm, she was lovely, she was wonderful. Finding Claudia had made all the difference.

  On this morning she was still sound asleep. He had risen early, taking care not to wake her. He liked to go up on deck before dawn and sit enjoying the sunrise. That was another thing he’d almost never done before Claudia came into his life. He had, of course, seen many a sunrise, but he’d seldom actually watched one. Before Claudia, all that a rising sun meant was that the darkness was no longer an ally.

  He now saw the dawn as a time of utter peace. The only sounds at that hour were the lapping of waves and the soft, rhythmic hum that the morning breeze made as it passed through the rigging above him. No birds were yet aloft. There were few lights on shore. There were none on any of the neighboring yachts. In a while, though, the little grocery would open. He would walk up the dock and buy some fruit and a couple of fresh-baked croissants.

  He would go unarmed, as he’d done for some time now. Claudia might chide him for going without her. She preferred to be with him as a second pair of eyes in case she was wrong about the danger being past. Or rather, in case her friend the pelican was wrong.

  Yes, Claudia spoke to birds. And to dogs. And to the wind. More to the point, they spoke to Claudia. But Whistler had managed to get her to agree to try not to let others see her doing so. Claudia, as it was, was hard enough to forget without him having to try to explain…well…why she’s different.

  He heard movement down below. She’d gotten up after all. He could hear her in the galley making coffee. In his mind, he could see her in her short terry robe, yawning and stretching and smiling to herself, brushing her nut-colored hair from her face, revealing those amazing brown eyes. Very soon, she’d be coming up to join him on deck. She’d be carrying two steaming mugs. Her eyes would find him and she’d greet him with a smile. It was a smile that no sunrise could match.

  And she would remind him that today was the day. He had promised her that beginning this morning, they would take the first step toward reclaiming their identities. No more counterfeit papers. No more assumed names. He’d prefer to have waited for a full year to have passed, but Claudia was probably right. It was time. A few weeks shouldn’t make any difference.

  Claudia was, by most standards, a beautiful young woman, even more so on the inside where it mattered the most. She was easily the kindest human being he’d met. The most loving, the most loyal, the most generous. She was bright, quick and funny, good at everything she tried.

  She was also, by most standards, certifiably crazy.

  But he didn’t care. He adored her.

  TWO

  They’d sailed north from Barbados to the island of Antigua. If all went well, they would stay for a month, passing the last weeks of winter. A month would be the longest that they’d stayed in one place. On that morning he would rent a permanent slip. It would also be the first time in almost a year that he’d used his real name, Adam Whistler.

  Claudia knew that he still had some serious misgivings. But she said he needn’t worry. She would be at his side. She would always be there to protect him. And so, she stood with him, holding his hand, as the dockmaster entered the name, Adam Whistler, into the marina’s computer. They both watched the dockmaster’s eyes. The marina’s computer was certainly linked to both Customs and the local police. And, although Antigua was British, not American, it was probably linked to several worldwide systems that tracked people whose names and locations were of interest to other law enforcement authorities.

  He wasn’t a fugitive in the ordinary sense. His whereabouts, however, were surely of interest to any number of people. But he saw no reaction on the dockmaster’s face. He maneuvered to where he could see the screen. His name wasn’t blinking. It hadn’t been flagged. As far as the marina’s computer was concerned, he was just another boater passing through.

  Claudia nudged him after they had left the office.

  “I thought so,” she said. “No one cares anymore.”

  “Believe me. They care. I’m not sure that was smart.”

  “Well, it’s done. And you’ll see. We’ll be fine.”

  Claudia, apparently, was at least partly right. In the days that followed, no police came to question him, nor did anyone seem to have them under surveillance while they were exploring the island on bikes. No one had searched the boat in their absence; he had rigged it so that he would have known.

  He did not fear arrest. No one wanted him arrested. He knew that nobody wanted a trial that would have made headlines and ruined careers. Ideally, they wanted him quietly dead. Not just him, but his father as well. They had reason to hate and fear his father even more. But they were fully aware that if they made the attempt, there would never again be talk of a truce. And especially, if they should hurt Claudia again, not even their families would be safe.

  They had very nearly killed her the first time.

  She’d been shot through the neck. The wound should have been fatal. And it was, in a manner of speaking. It was during a drug raid on her mother’s place of business. Drugs were found, but the drugs had been planted.

  They were planted by people with whom he had worked until, as they saw it, he betrayed them. He had taken something from them. An incriminating ledger. They wanted it back at all costs. They wanted, in addition, some form of insurance that he would never speak of its contents. Killing him would have done them no good. They would still have his father to deal with. They chose instead to take something in return that both he and his father valued greatly. Their hope was for a stand-off, one that neutralized them both.

  The drug raid went badly. Such raids often did. Two policemen, both corrupt, who took part in the raid had been startled by Claudia’s sudden appearance. It was dark. She had surprised them. They had fired at her shape. Whistler never knew which one of them had hit her. It would not have made any difference.

  Left to him, he would have finished everyone who was involved. It was one thing he knew how to do and do well. But he hadn’t because a deal had been struck and Whistler had been forced to accept it. The other side had chosen to cut its losses and negotiate a détente. The deal was not everything that Whistler would have wanted, but he had promised his father to abide by it. The other side appeared to have kept its end as well, but only, perhaps, because he’d been hard to find. As he’d tried to tell Claudia, some wounds never heal, but he’d chosen not to go into detail with her as to the nature of those wounds. He had chosen not to tell her of the price they had paid. Aside from the dead, there were two other men who would live with disfigurement for the rest of their lives. One of these had been shamed, made to scream, made to beg, as he lost control of his bowels. It wasn’t Whistler who cut him; someone else had got to him, but the thing had been done in his name.

  He’d told Claudia only that they had been punished and that some resentment may have lingered
. And he’d told her that these were not all by any means. There were others from his past who might be tempted to try him if only they knew what he looked like.

  But she wasn’t concerned. She said that he needn’t worry. She reminded him that no harm could befall him as long as she was there to watch over him.

  In Claudia’s mind, this was not a conceit. It was neither wishful thinking nor hubris. She was sure, without a doubt, that she could keep him from harm because she was his guardian angel.

  To be clear, she didn’t mean this in a metaphoric sense or as a standby-your-man sort of thing. She meant it as a literal truth. She’d been given the job by a spirit that she met while she was clinically dead. Her heart had stopped before the ambulance reached her and again on the operating table. The doctors got it beating again, but even they didn’t think that it would matter. She’d been flat-lined for more than eight minutes the first time and another six minutes the next.

  After dying for the second time...or rather after reviving...she’d sent word that she wanted to see him. She was in a Denver hospital, recovering from surgery. It was four days after the shooting.

  He almost didn’t go, not because he feared a trap. By then he was not the one being hunted. One reason behind his reluctance was guilt. She’d been shot and almost died because of things he had done, but of which she’d known nothing up until the week before. Another was because, the last time he saw her, she’d told him that she wanted him out of her life. She had called him a liar and worse.

  Two men in dark suits had come to the house where Claudia was then staying with her mother. They identified themselves as government agents and asked to speak to both of them in confidence. They proceeded to tell Claudia that the man she’d been involved with was not at all what he seemed. Until recently, they said, he’d been in their employ. No, Whistler was not a federal agent himself. He’d had a background and training that they’d hoped to employ in the service of his country’s vital interests. Regrettably, however, they’d been forced to release him. He had proven to be mentally unstable.

  They produced a report by a government psychiatrist. They read from it rather than showing it. It said that although he might seem almost normal, he suffered from paranoid delusions. He saw enemies and conspiracies wherever he looked, especially within his own government. He was also a thief. He had stolen certain documents. They wanted to know what sort of things he might have told her. Had he asked her, perhaps, to hold anything for him? A package or an envelope, for example.

  She asked them what he did while he was “in their employ.” Their response was, “We’re asking the questions.”

  That didn’t sit well with either Claudia or her mother. Her mother asked to see their photo ID so that she could write down their names. She also asked them for a closer look at the psychiatrist’s report they were quoting. They ignored both requests. She asked them to leave. The big one replied, “We can help you or hurt you. I would do what I’m told if I was you.”

  “Well, if I was you,” her mother mimicked his grammar, “I would get the hell out of this house.”

  The interview had gone downhill very quickly. The big one looked as if he might slap her. The other one, the bald one, waved the bigger one off and pulled a file from his briefcase. He said, “We tried to do this without scaring you too badly. Now I’ll show you what a psycho Whistler is."

  The file, or the parts that he allowed her to read, said that he, Adam Whistler, was a cold-blooded killer who was wanted in a half dozen countries. “He’s not just a killer. He’s worse. He’s a butcher. You think he wouldn’t kill you? Two women? Let me show you.”

  He produced several photographs of the scene of a massacre. It appeared to be a family. They all looked Hispanic. Men, women and children, grandparents as well.

  “And this is just one. It’s not even the worst. Now look close at the kids. See their throats have been cut? He did the kids first so their parents could watch. You want someone taking pictures like these of you two? Help us, we’ll help you. It’s that simple.”

  According to Claudia, this was followed by a rant against him and his “expatriate father.” His father, they said, was, if anything, worse. A renegade, a traitor, turned his back on his country. An extortionist, an employer of killers for hire. A man who had taught his own son how to kill. And a man not above using innocent women as a cover for his criminal designs.

  Most of this wasn’t true, but enough of it was. Claudia was in no mood to sort fact from fiction. What she knew was that he had lied from the start. Claudia had confronted him. She caught him off guard. She asked him, “Just tell me. What are you?”

  He said, “Wait a minute. You say one of them was bald? And the second man, the bigger one….thin lips and no neck? His eyes look like nobody’s home?”

  “And he stank of cigars. So you know them.”

  “Claudia…look…there are things I haven’t told you…”

  “Oh, really? No shit.” She threw up her hands. “And this stuff about your father. He’s actually worse? Who was your grandfather, Hitler?”

  She knew his father. So did her mother. They’d met in Aspen four months before this happened when his father had flown over from Europe. His father and her mother had since become friends, corresponding by telephone and email.

  “Claudia...none of this is at all what you think. If you’ll let me, I’ll try to explain.”

  “Do you kill people, Adam?”

  “People who? You mean that dead family they showed you?”

  “Them or anyone, Adam. That’s a yes or no question.”

  “No, I don’t. I mean...not people like you. I would never...”

  “Oh, Adam, shut up and get out.”

  “Those men...what exactly did they ask you to do?”

  “It no longer matters. I told them to cram it. They were even more repulsive than you are.”

  Whistler was sure that he knew who they were. Two men, dark suits, and that heavy-handed could only be Lockwood and Briggs. They weren’t trained agents. They were little more than goons. The one with dead eyes, the one who’d almost slapped her mother, was Lockwood, a man with a near-lizard brain who had once attempted to intimidate Whistler by actually twirling his gun. And Claudia was right; he did stink of cigars; he had one between his teeth at the time. It had apparently never crossed the man’s mind that a pistol being twirled is non-functional.

  Whistler dropped him with a kick to the crotch. Briggs was there at the time, but chose not to intercede although Whistler had invited him to do so if he wished. Briggs was marginally brighter than Lockwood, but, as evidenced by the presentation he’d made, had failed to grasp the concept of overkill. They both worked for a man named Felix Aubrey and the ledger Whistler took belonged to Aubrey. But he couldn’t imagine what they’d hoped to gain by approaching Claudia in that way. One does not tell a woman, “See? He cuts children’s’ throats” and expect her to carry on as before except that she’d now be an informant.

  The worst of it was, there was nothing to inform on. Neither Claudia nor her mother were being “used” in any way. Neither he nor his father had any “designs.” He had thought that they’d reached an understanding with Aubrey. All he’d wanted from them was to be left alone. They would be left alone in return.

  He was sorely tempted to find her two visitors and throw them both out of a window. But as angry as he was, he decided to do nothing. It wouldn’t help Claudia’s opinion of him if she learned of their deaths on the six o’clock news. He would simply go away, stay away for a while. In a week or so he would try calling Claudia. She might hang up on him the first time or two, but he wouldn't give up. He would get her to listen. After hearing the truth she might still despise him, but at least she would hate him for things he had done and not for what those clowns had told her.

  Doing nothing turned out to be a mistake. He’d allowed himself to hope that if he took no action, they wouldn’t bother Claudia or her mother again, having realized that they were
in no way involved. In that respect, he’d been stupidly naïve. Having shown their hand with that clumsy approach, they decided that they had better play it out, and quickly, before he or his father could respond. He should have foreseen that, but he hadn’t.

  Either way, there he stood, outside her hospital room, his heart breaking at the sight of her lying there. They had moved her that morning from Intensive Care but her care seemed no less intense. There were tubes in both arms and one ran to her nose. Apparently she needed help breathing. Her throat was thickly bandaged and two drains had been implanted. She looked so very small, so very frail in that bed. But she seemed to be asleep and not in pain.

  Her mother was with her. She looked up and saw him. She started to speak but she could only shake her head. She got up and left the room without a word.

  He had spoken to her doctor about her condition. The bullet had hit her just over the collarbone. It had grazed both her trachea and her spine, but in the doctor’s view, she’d been lucky. He said the shock and the swelling had caused some paralysis, but he thought that she’d recover full use of her limbs. On that morning she’d been able to raise her left arm. She could move and even flex all her fingers. She was still quite weak and it hurt her to talk. The doctor said that he could see her, but for only a few minutes. The doctor’s real concern was the loss of brain function. He said, “Well...you’ll see for yourself.”

  Whistler, reluctantly, entered the room. He tried to make no sound, but she must have sensed his presence. She took a deep breath and her eyes fluttered open. It took them a moment to focus on him. When they did, he’d expected to see blame, condemnation. Their expression, however, was gentle, serene. There was even a trace of a smile.

  She moistened her lips and asked him to come closer. Her voice was raspy, not much more than a whisper. She told him that she was glad that he’d come. She had needed to see him so that she could explain why the light had told her to go back.