I yanked the truck’s passenger door open and climbed inside, watching as Gabriel hesitated just outside the truck cabin to look over at the priest. Father Barnes glared back at his former research partner, his voice booming across my face.
“Oh for heaven’s sake Gabriel, just get your ass in the truck! This isn’t the time to be holding childish grudges!”
Gabriel moved into the front of the truck and closed the door as I found myself mashed between the broad shoulders of an increasingly agitated Catholic priest, and the bone thin shoulders of a Frenchman with a knack for catapulting himself off of second floor fire escapes.
This is shaping up to be one hell of a night.
All three of our heads turned toward the Black Cat as the sound of gunfire shattered the softer patter of rainfall. The thinner of the two men, the one I called Mr. Skinny, had fired several rounds at the parked Ford. Two bullets tore into the truck’s hood, while the third shattered the driver’s side mirror.
“Christ on a crutch, those assholes want us dead!”
Father Barnes shouted those words while slamming the truck’s accelerator to the floor, the rear tires spinning loudly on the wet pavement as the Ford lunged forward onto the street, its V8 engine filling our ears with its throaty, mechanical roar.
To my left I could see Gabriel’s gaunt face covered in a wide grin, his eyes hungrily scanning the increasingly fast moving landscape around us.
The priest looked into the rear view mirror and cursed under his breath, his eyes narrowing as he drove the truck through an intersection without slowing, barely missing a black, four door Mercedes that blared its horn at us as we passed in front of it.
‘They’re following us.”
Both Gabriel and I turned to stare back through the truck cab’s rear window at the street behind us. A pair of headlights was no more than a block away, and catching up.
“I saw those two before. They were following Dedra and tried to jump us after a meeting we had.”
The priest grunted as he suddenly turned the truck sharply to the right onto a residential side street.
“No doubt working for Morehouse or someone connected to him. I watched them walk into the bar and knew right away they were trouble. They look like cops – bad cops.”
I recalled thinking the very same thing when I first saw them, figuring they were retired law enforcement making extra cash as rent-a-thugs.
“How’d you know we’d make our way out of the bar?”
Father Barnes looked over at me and shrugged.
“I didn’t, but if anyone has a talent for disappearing, it’s Gabriel.”
Gabriel turned his head to stare back at the priest, his grin having been replaced with an unreadable absence of emotion.
“Perhaps you prayed to God that he would deliver us safely to you Victor, and your prayers were answered.”
Gabriel’s tone was mocking, almost sinister. Clearly the history he shared with Father Barnes, was far from water under the bridge.
“Don’t you disrespect my faith, Gabriel, I’m warning you.”
The Frenchman’s grin returned.
“Oh ye of little faith, why are you so afraid?”
The priest’s large right hand arced across me, striking the left side of Gabriel’s mouth with crunching force, causing the Frenchman’s head to snap to his right where it struck the passenger window with a heavy thud.
When Gabriel turned his head to face Father Barnes, a thin line of deep red blood ran from the left corner of his lower lip. He appeared neither hurt, nor shocked at the priest’s violence against him. In fact, I was quite certain he was pleased by it.
“See, Frank that is the REAL Victor. He is a violent, perpetually angry man, who thinks his title of priest excuses a life of incompetent failure. Without me, he has no formulation. Without me, his research is nothing. His existence has no meaning. He doesn’t try to save others out of a sense of wanting to do good. No, he tries to save others in the hope of then saving himself! It is an entire premise based upon self-serving, emotional avarice.”
The priest’s jaw clenched and unclenched, his hands gripping the Ford’s steering wheel with enough force I feared he would bend it in half as his eyes returned once again to the rear view mirror.
“Enough! I will not be chased like some frightened child!”
The Ford catapulted into another intersection and turned sharply to the left, its right tires screaming in protest as my body slammed into Gabriel. I found my hands clawing the dashboard in front of me as we then accelerated directly toward the vehicle following us.
“What the hell are you doing?”
My shout was ignored as the priest lowered his head slightly, his eyes now locked onto the still approaching sedan. Gabriel clapped his hands together, his head rapidly nodding his approval.
“Yes, Victor, embrace your truth! Scatter their sin onto the pavement! Be the Hand of God you were meant to be!”
I braced myself for the imminent impact, panicked as I realized I had no seatbelt and therefore would likely be sent flying through the Ford’s windshield. At times like this, only two words ever seemed up to the task of adequately expressing what one truly feels.
Oh shit.
22.
There could have been no more than a few feet between the two vehicles before the sedan suddenly veered to its right to avoid the impact. The car momentarily careened out of control before slamming into a parked station wagon on the side of the street. The sound of the crash was sure to attract a crowd, and soon after, the cops.
The priest let out a triumphant shout and turned the truck around so he was once again facing the two men who were at that moment, exiting their wrecked car. I noted Pot Belly had a large band-aid placed across the upper portion of his forehead, indicating to me he was likely the one who had tried to run over the priest the other day in the hospital parking lot.
That means they had been following Dedra, and the priest. How’d they know we were at the hospital so soon after we arrived there?
Before I could stop him, Father Barnes was out the driver’s door and walking swiftly toward the two men, his right hand pointing his gun in their direction.
“Don’t move you bastards! Think you can run around terrorizing people like this? Think nobody is willing to stand up to you? Well think again – this time you fucked with the wrong priest!”
I was yelling for Father Barnes not to lose his head as I struggled to catch up to him.
“Father, there’s gonna be law enforcement arriving here any minute! You can’t help Dedra if you’re stuck in jail! Put the gun down!”
The priest stopped, his right hand trembling as he pointed the weapon at the head of Pot Belly. The trembling was not out of fear of killing another human being, but rather his fight to prevent himself from doing exactly that.
He wanted so badly to pull that trigger.
“They tried to kill us, Bennington! And they won’t stop unless I kill them first!”
“It doesn’t matter! If it’s not them, it’ll be somebody else! None of this stops until Dedra is saved, and your information is given over to the group we work for. Once we do that, there’s no reason for them to come after you. Remember, Father it’s not just about saving Dedra, it’s about saving a lot of other people, but that means you get back in that truck and leave these two assholes to answer to the cops themselves.”
The priest’s mouth curled upward into a snarl, his face a mask of aggressive rage.
“Get back in the car! Get back in that car and don’t come out!”
The two men looked at one another and then nodded back at the priest, moving themselves slowly back into the sedan.
“I wanna see both your hands on the dash, and stay that way until we’re gone! You move from there, I come out shooting! We understand each other here?”
I saw Pot Belly shake his head. The sound of sirens was growing closer. In another minute, we would find ourselves surrounded by the police.
&n
bsp; “Ok, Father, we got to go - NOW.”
I held my breath as I watched the priest remain standing in the middle of the street, his gun still aimed at the two men’s vehicle. Finally the gun was lowered and Father Barnes looked back at me, the battle lust greatly diminished from his eyes.
“Yeah, let’s go.”
We both jogged back to the parked and idling pick-up truck. Both driver and passenger doors were already open.
Wait, where the hell is Gabriel?
The only sign of Gabriel was a single sheet of paper left on the passenger side of the seat with a brief note, and then below that, a convoluted series of what appeared to be mathematical equations. I silently read the note to myself.
Here is what you asked for. Remember Victor, you must make certain to correctly factor in the patient’s weight, and pre-treatment internal acidity. As for you, Mr. Bennington, I’m certain to meet with you again some day. I’ll bring the wine. –Gabriel
“He’s gone, Father. Left this note with what I assume, is the formulation you needed to treat Dedra with.”
The priest had already situated himself behind the steering wheel as I slammed the passenger door shut and then handed him the piece of paper which he then quickly scanned while pulling back onto the street and driving away.
“Is that normal for him – to just take off like that?”
Father Barnes grunted as he looked into the rearview mirror to see if we were being followed. The glow of flashing police lights temporarily filled the darkness around us as a D.C. Metro police cruiser sped by in the other lane.
“Like I said, if anyone knows how to disappear, it’s Gabriel.”
I glanced down at the paper held in the priest’s right hand.
“You certain he remembered it correctly, the formulation?”
Father Barnes merely shrugged, his eyes continuing to look behind us.
“He’s right when he says he remembers everything. I’ve never seen him get something like that wrong – ever. That said, we won’t know for sure until after I administer the treatment to Dedra, and even then, given the amount of chemo that’s been pumped into her…”
The priest’s voice trailed off into nothingness. I knew what his silence implied. Dedra’s chances for survival were not in her favor. A damn miracle was what she needed, and I hoped to God Gabriel’s formulation would prove to be just that.
23.
Father Barnes decided we should return to the hide out in the basement of the monastery. Instead, I wanted to be dropped off at my apartment so I could clean up.
“Might be better we split up anyways, that way they can’t get to us both at the same time.”
The priest remained silent, likely pondering the wisdom, or the bullshit, of what I just suggested.
“Look, Father Barnes, you drop me off, go back to the monastery and look over the formulation. If you’re convinced it’s right, we meet up first thing tomorrow morning and make our way back to the hospital, or whatever plan you had for giving Dedra the treatment.”
The priest frowned as he let out a long, frustrated sigh.
“That’s just it, Frank, there’s no way they will let me administer the treatment to her at the hospital. Plus, I have to gather the materials, put the formulation together, I need hypodermics, drips. Getting the formulation was just the first step. From here, hell, it gets even more complicated for us.”
I didn’t care for the priest’s tone. It sounded far too close to giving up on Dedra, and no way in hell was that an option for me.
“Stop saying what we can’t do, Father and start thinking about what we can do to help Dedra.”
The priest turned the truck onto a familiar side road. We were nearing my apartment complex.
“I’ll think on it Frank, ok? Like you said, we get together again first thing tomorrow morning, and figure it out. I promise you, I’m not giving up.”
The Ford pulled into a parking space in front of my apartment. Before getting out, I took a moment to look around the parking lot and the stairwell leading up to my door to make certain nobody was waiting for me.
“I’ll call you early Frank, and then come pick you up.”
I used my right shoulder to open the passenger door and stepped into the outside darkness, glad that the rain had stopped.
“Ok, Father, see you tomorrow then.”
I watched the truck pull away while standing on the balcony outside my apartment entrance. Once the taillights had faded into the night, I confirmed my door was locked as I had left it.
The inside of the apartment was as I remembered. Small, sparsely furnished, and smelling of bad carpet and a likely assortment of critters that called the insides of the walls their home.
Home sweet home.
I fell into the torn and frayed couch that dominated the small room, my feet extended over one of the arm rests, my eyes growing heavy almost immediately as sleep quickly settled over me.
There’s someone else in the apartment.
My mind battled to refocus, pulling itself from what had been a very deep slumber.
You forgot to lock the door, and somebody made their way inside.
Maybe I was dreaming, or just disoriented, a touch of night panic perhaps.
You don’t get your ass off this couch, you might never see another tomorrow.
The familiar click of my front door lock being put into place disturbed the silence of the apartment, confirming I was in fact, not alone.
With the apartment bathed in darkness, I figured I had the advantage of knowing every nook and cranny of the place. Whoever this visitor was, would be stumbling around in the dark, at least momentarily.
I pushed myself up from the couch, my eyes making out the dark outline of a figure no more than ten feet away. It was impossible to tell if they were armed or not, but there was something very odd about their form.
Is that some kind of dwarf?
Again I thought I was struggling to push away the effects of my deep sleep. The idea of a dwarf assassin making their way into my apartment was ridiculous, even for me, and I had hardly been drinking the entire day. That said, whoever faced me was definitely very short, but big. My eyes were adjusting quickly to the inky gloom, and I could now more easily make out a pair of broad shoulders, though they appeared to sit no more than a few feet off the ground.
With both hands, I grasped onto each end of the small coffee table that sat directly in front of the couch and flung it at the shadowy figure. I was stunned to see the table caught in mid-flight and then slowly placed back down onto the apartment floor.
“Nice one, Mr. Bennington now you mind turning on a light?”
I know that voice. Where the hell have I heard it before?
“Who are you?”
“Turn on a goddamn light and you’ll see who I am!”
I moved slowly to my left, toward the kitchen nook, trying to find the wall switch while keeping my eyes focused on the dark figure who had invaded my home.
When the light came on, I stared back at the somewhat familiar face of Alberto Diaz, the former Army Ranger who I remembered working the reception desk for Congresswoman Mears during my first assignment with the T3 Group. He was a wheelchair bound Hispanic man, not yet forty, his legs cut off just above each knee. Like Dedra, his injuries were sustained during combat in the Middle East.
“Alberto Diaz, right?”
Alberto gave a brief smile and nodded.
“That’s right, Mr. Bennington. The congresswoman assigned me to you due to Dedra’s leave of absence. I’m here to help keep you safe. I was supposed to call you, but we had your residence on file, so I decided I’d just make my way here and meet you in person. I don’t care much for the phone. Never know who’s listening in.”
I slowly lowered myself onto the couch, trying to work through the idea of a man in wheelchair being assigned to protect me. Something about that just seemed a little…off.
“I can see you’re uncertain about me working with you, Mr. Ben
nington. I assure you, I’m more than capable of being an asset.”
I felt guilty at having my concerns so easily discovered by Alberto.
“Oh, I’m sure you can Alberto, it’s just, you know, sometimes I have to pick up and run from the bad guys, and uh…”
Oh God, I’m such an asshole.
Alberto Diaz shrugged.
“You’ll see, Mr. Bennington. You go back to sleep, and I’ll stay up and keep watch. Nobody is getting through that door, which by the way, you really should keep locked.”
Private Detective: BENNINGTON P.I.: A thrilling four-novel political murder mystery private detective series... Page 46