Cosmic Forces: Book Three in The Jake Helman Files Series

by Gregory Lamberson

  “You won’t.” Abel held out a plastic bag containing Jake’s wallet, cell phone, and keys. “Weiskopf had these as well as your gun. My brother neglected to retrieve them for you.”

  Jake eyed Cain, who glared at Abel. “GOODY TWO-SHOES.”

  Abel extended one hand. “We did it, Brother.”

  Cain looked at the hand, then shook it. “YES, WE DID. THOUGH YOU DESERVE LITTLE OF THE CREDIT. THIS TALKING INSECT DID AS MUCH AS YOU.”

  “You’ll never change.”

  “YOU’RE RIGHT.”

  Cain squeezed Abel’s hand, crushing it. Abel cried out, going down on his knees. Cain seized his brother by the throat, straddled him, and smashed his head on the floor.

  Sheryl stepped forward with alarm on her face. “Stop it!”

  Abel grabbed Cain’s wrists, but Cain still pounded his brother’s head on the floor repeatedly.

  Here we go again, Jake thought.

  Abel’s eyes rolled up in their sockets, and the back of his head caved in. Cain laughed, a sound like a garbage compactor in action. Abel’s hands fell away, but Cain continued to smash the broken head on the floor. Then they both disappeared.

  Jake turned to Sheryl, but she had vanished as well.

  Shit, he thought.

  Drawing his breath, he sighed and looked around. The entire dock glistened with water. No sign of Avademe remained. Whatever blood Weiskopf had spilled had washed away. The bodies floated on the water, and Jake spotted at least one ring glinting in the light.

  CHAPTER

  25

  Jake turned the Maxima around and drove it alongside the truck that had transported him to the building. The clock on the car radio flashed 3:17 at him. Leaving his door open, he drew his Glock and walked over to the metal gate. A control box hung off to one side, supported by an electrical coil. Two buttons were set in the box: one red and the other black. He thumbed the red button, and as the gate rumbled open, he ran back to the car and got in. His body ached all over, which at least defused the pain in his face.

  Rain pelted the shipyard. Recalling the armed guards he had seen patrolling the grounds during the daytime, he prepared himself for another fight. When the gate had risen halfway, he pulled out. Floodlights illuminated the sheets of rain that struck the buildings and driveways, and he saw city lights far in the distance beyond the fence. Proceeding at a slow pace, he approached the security booth at the front gate. The guard watched him approach, then threw whatever switch opened the gate.

  He must have been on duty when they brought the car in.

  Waving to the guard without looking at him, so as to conceal his wounds, Jake drove through the gate and gunned the engine.

  Half an hour later, he parked outside his building and knocked on Laurel’s parlor door.

  When Laurel opened her door, her eyes heavy with sleep, she gasped. “What the hell happened to your face?”

  Jake moved past her and she locked the door. “It’s a long story.” He gave her a full view of the damage. “Can you do anything about it?”

  Laurel stepped closer, and Jake disliked the way the blood drained from her face. “No. It’s too late for that, and the wounds look infected. You stink, too. Go upstairs and take a shower, then come back and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Jake didn’t argue. Upstairs, he gazed at his reflection in his bathroom mirror. Half of his face resembled a monster from an old horror movie, like Mr. Sardonicus or I Was a Teenage Frankenstein.

  Moving into his office, he glanced at the open safe door and the silver metal particles all over the floor. He had done the right thing leaving Afterlife with Laurel; if Reichard’s men had gotten their hands on the program, Avademe would have devoured him on sight.

  He showered, the hot water and steam stinging the wounds on his face, arms, and back and causing him to flinch. After changing into dry clothes and inserting his glass eye, he went downstairs, where Laurel had set up disinfectant and bandages on the round table.

  “Sit down and tip your head back,” Laurel said. “This is going to hurt a lot.”

  Jake sat back and looked at the ceiling. Laurel raised the bottle above his head and tipped it. He saw the clear disinfectant pouring down toward him and closed his eyelids. Fire consumed his face, and he dug his fingers into the chair’s armrests and bared his clenched teeth at her. Still she continued to pour the disinfectant on his wounds, and he jerked his shoulders from side to side. Finally he screamed and she stopped. He opened his eyelids, and through the tears he saw Laurel waving a roll of gauze.

  “This should hold you together long enough for you to see that shady doctor of yours.”

  Lawrence Metivier treated special clients for cash and left no paper trail.

  She positioned a wide gauze strip over one of the lacerations. “I take it you’ve saved the world and punished the wicked, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  Jake sighed. “I guess so.” For now.

  Three days later, Martin sat feeding Edgar in Jake’s office. Jake’s chest swelled with emotion at the sight of father and son reunited in such a strange manner. He and Martin had shot some baskets, then came to the office dripping sweat.

  “He likes me,” Martin said.

  “He sure does,” Jake said.

  “What’s his name?”

  Jake hesitated. He couldn’t tell Martin that the raven on his desk shared a name with his father. “Just call him buddy.”

  Martin stroked Edgar’s back. “Good boy, buddy.”

  Edgar cawed, then pecked at Martin’s face with his beak, which elicited laughter from the boy.

  A cell phone chimed and Martin answered it. “Hi, Mom.” He paused. “Okay, I’ll be right down.” He shut the phone. “Time for me to go.”

  Jake guided the boy through the suite to the door. “How about next Saturday?”

  “You got it.”

  Jake watched Martin board the elevator, then closed the door and locked it.

  Returning to his office, he stopped in his tracks. A woman sat in the chair facing his desk. Edgar perched on the arm she held upright for him.

  “I’ve really got to upgrade my security. It doesn’t do much good against you cosmic types.”

  Sheryl rose and faced him. Edgar remained on her arm.

  Jake moved closer to her. “Edgar seems to trust you.”

  “Don’t you?” Her hair appeared short, the way she liked it.

  “I have my doubts.”

  “Your face looks better.”

  “I look like a jigsaw puzzle. Eighty stitches. My doctor recommends plastic surgery.”

  “That sounds like a good idea.”

  “Maybe I’ll wait to see what the scars look like before I decide. Is this a social visit? I thought you and Abel would be honeymooning in the clouds by now.”

  “Don’t sulk.”

  “I’m not sulking. I’m disfigured. Thanks for getting me involved in all this.”

  “Marla Madigan got you involved before I came to you, and so did Joyce.”

  “Why did you add your two cents?”

  “I wanted to make sure you were properly motivated and had a sense of the bigger picture if you stumbled on Avademe.”

  “Your new in-laws. I hope to God you aren’t here to enlist me in another cause. I need a break from this heaven and hell stuff.”

  “I didn’t come here to ask you for any favors. I doubt you’ll see me—or anyone else from the Realm of Light—again. We’re busy getting our house in order.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I came to say good-bye, for one thing. I didn’t get a chance to back at Reichard’s shipyard.”

  “You did take off kind of fast.”

  “I also came to thank you . . . and to reward you.”

  Jake raised his eyebrows. “With a kiss? Does Abel know you’re here?”

  She smiled. “I came to give you something you desire much more than a kiss from me.”

  “Don’t be so sure about that.”

&n
bsp; Sheryl turned to Edgar. “Part of my soul resided inside you for almost a year and a half. I was aware of everything you did during that time, except whenever you entered that psychic business downstairs. That was the first blind spot I encountered after the Tower. And ever since then, your mind has acted as a blind spot to me, too. I’ve been unable to observe you in that parlor and unable to read your thoughts where the psychic’s involved.”

  Holding Sheryl’s gaze, Jake said nothing. Instead, he visualized that brick wall, just to be safe.

  “She must be a very powerful witch.”

  It had occurred to Jake that Laurel was more than a psychic. After all, Kira Thorn had created the shield for Old Nick, and she had studied witchcraft with a coven in Massachusetts. “Who said my psychic connection is a she?”

  Sheryl’s eyes twinkled. “Call it a woman’s intuition. Or maybe this psychic never thought to create a blind spot within Edgar.”

  Jake glanced at the raven, his heart beating faster.

  “But that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is this: she told you Katrina was the only person who could reverse the spell that turned Edgar into a raven, and that isn’t true. A reversal spell can be performed by someone else from Katrina’s bloodline.”

  Jake stared at Sheryl. “Katrina was an orphan. Drug dealers killed her parents.”

  “She had other relatives.”

  “Her grandmother was her guardian. She drowned in New Orleans.”

  “You’re a private eye. Start snooping. There’s a solution to Edgar’s predicament, but you’d better hurry: he loses a little more of his humanity every day he remains in this form, and he’s aging twice as fast as a human.”

  “Can’t you just tell me who I should look for?”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  “Abel told me a lot more—”

  Sheryl cocked one eyebrow, which Jake took as a warning. She tapped Edgar’s beak. “Thanks for everything, Jake. I mean that. I hope you find happiness.” She waved her arm and Edgar flapped his wings, settling on Jake’s shoulder.

  As the bird turned around, Jake frowned. Sheryl had disappeared.

  Jake walked to the window and gazed out at the Tower. It seemed like any other building now. The day’s commotion over the murders of the cabal members, including the mayor of New York City, awaited him. Looking at Edgar, he wondered if Laurel had simply not known there was a chance Edgar could still be returned to his normal self or if she had deliberately withheld the information.

  “So much for putting this supernatural shit behind us.”

  Edgar croaked.

  Staring at the raven, Jake recalled that his partner had admired the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

  “‘Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.’”

  THE PATCH ADAMCZAK FILES

  FROM THE WORLD OF THE JAKE HELMAN FILES

  I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong: I’m not Patch Adamczak. My name is Jeffrey Patro. Maybe you’ve seen my byline. I’m a reporter for a trendy New York magazine and a blogger for one of the best political websites around. You know the drill: cutting-edge media, download that app now. Patch Adamczak, on the other hand, was old school: if it didn’t make the printed page, it never happened on the world stage. Some people in the biz thought Patch was a dinosaur, a relic from an age when people primarily got their information from newspapers or Walter Cronkite. Maybe he was the last of his kind, but to me he was an absolute gem.

  But I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. You need a little background information before I get to the main course of this deluxe meal. Would you like some fries with that global conspiracy?

  I met Patch in D.C. when I was a mere cub reporter trying to make a name for myself at the Washington Post. He was already legendary for his exposés on Watergate and Iran Contra. His byline was Walter Adamczak, but everyone who knew him personally called him Patch, and in D.C., everyone knew him personally.

  I never learned the origin of his nickname; the esteemed Mr. Adamczak didn’t wear an eye patch, and his sports jackets lacked patches on the elbows. I asked him about his moniker once, and all he said was, “We don’t get to choose our nicknames, kid.” He seemed to like it well enough, though; anything that distanced a reporter from his reporting was okay by him. In his golden years, he could have ridden his reputation into a cushy job as an analyst on cable news—God knows he was colorful enough—but he never craved the limelight. “A reporter should never be part of the story.” He was a newspaperman through and through.

  Patch was a small man with wispy white hair and stooped shoulders, but he had a booming voice that usually came out of one side of his mouth or the other. Whenever he entered the bull pen, you knew it. The simple act of dropping his wrinkled raincoat over the back of his desk chair and riffling through a stack of messages drew the eyes of the other reporters, even those busy working the phones. We all sensed that whatever Patch was working on, it was big. That was Patch: small in size, gargantuan in stature.

  I still remember the first time he spoke to me. I was leaving the men’s room at the paper as he was entering. I wanted to tell him how much I admired him, how much I wanted to be like him, without sounding like a fool, but I froze as his beady, toad-wise eyes looked me up and down and made contact with mine. Before I could speak he said, “Kid, your barn door’s open. Zip up your fly before you go out into the world, okay?”

  The second time was maybe six weeks later. By then, I was accustomed to him being gone for long stretches of time. Patch didn’t cover a beat; he covered stories, wherever they took him. As far as I knew, our publisher never complained about his expense report because Patch’s travels paid off in spades. Two weeks earlier, I’d written a piece on the US invasion of Afghanistan. I thought it was good, and Tony V, my editor, thought so too. He ran it relatively intact, anyway. I was at my desk, scanning the online edition, when I noticed Patch hovering beside my desk, a twinkle in his eyes and a half smile on his face. I figured he needed to borrow a pencil or something.

  “Kid, I read your Afghanistan piece.”

  I raised my eyebrows, surprised that he had connected my person to my byline.

  “You got facts in there. You got quotes. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an ending, just like every good story needs. But there’s too much subtext.”

  “Too much subtext?” I tried not to sound too much like Tom Hulce as Mozart in the movie Amadeus, responding to criticism of one of his operas by Emperor Joseph II, played by Jeffrey Jones.

  “You didn’t exactly spell out your opinions, but they’re there between the lines, like fireworks. You want to be a reporter or a columnist?”

  I shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind being both.”

  “Well, you can’t be both. If you want to report the news, you’re a reporter. If you want to have your picture above your byline and tell the world what you think about it, then you’re a columnist. You’d better make up your mind which one you want to do if you want to do either one well.”

  I felt more than a little chagrined. “Tony thought it was fine.”

  Patch’s mouth formed a full smile, a rarity. “How do you know what he thought? Did he tell you it was fine? Editors have deadlines too. Sometimes things slip through the cracks, even though they shouldn’t. That’s the nature of this beast of ours. Now I’m not stepping on your toes. I’m just giving you some friendly advice. Take it or leave it.” With that, he returned to his desk and whatever story he had in his brain.

  I returned my attention to my article and reread it from the top with his critique in mind.

  A month or so later, Patch stopped at my desk again and looked down at me. I raised my eyes to his, and he nodded.

  “That piece on the plane crash wasn’t bad.” He resumed his trek to his desk before I could thank him for his approval.

  I don’t know why his opinion mattered to me so much, but it did. Over the next six years, I looked forward to his appraisals, sometimes pos
itive, sometimes indifferent. I engaged him in conversation at watering holes frequented by print journalists, and I suppose you could say we formed something of a bond. He wasn’t exactly a mentor—he didn’t have time for that—but he set an example for me, and I wrote several stories that he praised. They were always follow-up pieces, elaborations on news that had already been broken by others.

  Oddly enough, when I moved to New York to take my current gig as a monthly magazine columnist, I saw Patch almost as often as I did in D.C. It was easy to picture him enjoying the same lifestyle in multiple cities across the country. Patch wasn’t the type to send holiday cards or birthday greetings; he only ever asked what I was working on, and that’s how I liked it.

  I was walking down Thirty-fourth Street when raindrops tapped my shoulder and my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but I took the call.

  “Kid, I’m in town and I need to see you.”

  Patch didn’t use a cell phone, and I heard the rumble of a subway train behind him.

  “Where are you?”

  “Not far from your place. Why don’t we meet there?”

  This was a new one: Patch had always favored talking in bars.

  “Sure, whatever you say. Give me half an hour.”

  “I’ll see you then.” He hung up.

  I took a cab so I wouldn’t be late. I stayed in a one-bedroom sublet on West Seventy-eighth Street. Prime real estate. I walked down the narrow hall that served as my building’s lobby, collected my mail from a narrow box, and took the narrow elevator to my third-floor domicile. As I fumbled for my keys, I heard the buzzer on the other side of the door. I unlocked the door and held it open with one foot as I pressed the button on the hunk of plastic mounted on the wall.

  Shrugging off my coat, I switched on a tall halogen lamp, standard issue for Manhattan apartments unequipped with ceiling fixtures. Outside, rain drizzled on the windows. I knew the elevator would take its time returning to the first floor, so I made a modest effort to straighten up the table and the coffee table. Not wanting Patch to think I was vain, I collected scattered issues of the magazine I wrote for and shoved them into a magazine stand. Then I stood waiting in the threshold of my apartment with the door open.