A Million to One: (The Millionth Trilogy Book 2)

by Tony Faggioli

  This made him laugh, which was also rare. When he was done he nodded. “Well. Anyway. Do you know what ‘Jasmine’ means?”

  “It means flower, dumbass.”

  He nodded. “Yes. But it also means something else.”

  “I don’t really give a shit. You had no right to do this to me.” She glanced at Pretty Ashley. “To us. Now let us go. Just—”

  “It means ‘gift from God,’” The Bread Man mused, looking her square in the eye. “How ironic is that? I mean, you can’t even make that shit up, ya know?”

  “Please, mister, don’t hurt her,” Pretty Ashley chimed in. The Bread Man knew that she knew the look that was in his eye now, she knew it well, because she looked away.

  But Jasmine? Not so much. “Who cares?” she shot back dismissively.

  “Oh. I would think you should care. Very much.”

  Worry was draped across her forehead. “Why should I?”

  “Because that tree-thing that you have on your shoulder, it’s very faithful stuff, no?”

  “I got it after high school,” she replied.

  “Before or after the symbol of death that you have on your other shoulder?”

  The room was silent for a long time. “Before.”

  “Mm-hmm,” The Bread Man said, turning back to his workbench. “I figured.”

  “So what?” Jasmine spat again.

  “You cannot serve two masters, little Jasmine, or you risk this type of thing,” The Bread Man said, waving his hand across the entire garage. “You’ve betrayed your God and now you’ve been given over to me, you see?”

  That seemed to do it for some reason. Her eyes filled with tears. “That’s not true. You’re a liar.”

  “No? Well. He’s not here, is He? But you are. A ‘gift of God’ right here, now in the hands of the devil.”

  She bowed her chin to her chest and started crying. “Shut… up. God, please, help me.”

  “Your God don’t care about you, girlie,” he said flatly.

  Reaching under the workbench he pulled out his knife, beautiful and shiny, its twelve-inch silver blade gleaming in contrast with its black onyx handle. He could use a stone, but there was something about a knife sharpened on a good piece of leather. The edge always cut cleaner for some reason.

  The two girls gasped.

  As he worked the knife back and forth across the leather, he looked back at Jasmine. “As a matter of fact, you’re about to find out how little about you he cares at all.”

  There was something about a knife. He didn’t know what. But there was a magic about it. No matter the face any of them held up to that point in this ritual, whether they were pleading faces or defiant faces, the knife wiped them all away very quickly.

  Jasmine’s look of defiance clicked off like a light and in its place came the mask The Bread Man loved the most: terror.

  She screamed and Ashley joined in, just like two little caged birds in a burning home.

  The Bread Man sighed and shook his head.

  It was all getting to be quite boring, really.

  CHAPTER 20

  I’VE GOTTA GET OUT of here, Napoleon thought.

  He was aware that The Gray Man was in him, but at a distance again now. At times Napoleon could hear him, there in his head, distraught. It made sense, on the face of it: hell was a horrid place, and evidently a thousand times more so if you were an angel.

  He imagined that The Gray Man was seeing things that no creation of a Heavenly Father was supposed to see. His grandmother had always spoken with deep reverence about angels when Napoleon was a boy. “They are special, mijo.”

  A blast of sand burrowed across his face, forcing him to raise a hand to shield his eyes. The heat was unbearable. It was dry most of the time, then there were pockets of rancid humidity, which made him wish for the dry heat again.

  The desert that stretched out ahead was barren, abstract and rocky. Ravines would appear suddenly, seemingly dropping off into oblivion. He had no idea why, but he never once imagined hell as a place with any depth to it.

  His legs were so heavy that after the hours of walking, he was now sometimes tripping and stumbling his way along. Somehow, they were still only marginally closer to the white glow in the distance.

  Weariness and defeat swirled inside him, mirroring the wind all around. When his will began to wane, he would feel The Gray Man return, momentarily, and surround him with some sort of aura that would cool his skin a bit, deflect the wind and sand and refresh him somehow.

  He felt no hunger, but his thirst was almost never ending. This, too, The Gray Man would quench, but only when it became unbearable. Because they existed partially symbiotically now, Napoleon didn’t need to ask what was very apparent: The Gray Man was fading, and the longer he remained here, in the place he was never meant to be, the closer he would come to discovery and destruction.

  Napoleon stopped for a second and looked out over the rolling dunes, which were streaked sideways now in grooves of varying depths by the wind, his hands on his knees. His body might be failing but his mind wasn’t. Not even close. And that made sense. Slowly but surely, like a crime scene, he was beginning to put it all together.

  This place was all about the mind. Because once you stripped a soul of its spirit, that’s all you had left: consciousness and the conscience that it encompassed. From there, hell could take the memories that you arrived with and slide them, like slivers of bamboo, under the fingernails of your pathetic new existence. Good memories or bad, it didn’t matter. One would make you deeply mourn for the joys you’d lost, while the other would bludgeon you with regret.

  In short, this place tortured you into madness, until you no longer knew who you were, and didn’t even care. That was how it succeeded—by taking a unique creation of God and reducing it to a dusty heap of insanity.

  Stop dwelling, Napoleon. The Gray Man spoke out of nowhere. Keep moving.

  Napoleon took a deep breath and did as he was commanded, tossing a little sarcasm to the back of his mind. “Welcome back.”

  Sorry. I had to leave for a bit. When it became apparent we weren’t going to make it there in time.

  “To that glowing in the distance, you mean?”

  Yes. It’s called The White City.

  “How do you know that?”

  I just learned it. By consulting with another.

  “Another?”

  Yes.

  “Who?”

  Someone who can help us.

  “Here?”

  Yes. She’s with him now.

  “You mean Kyle?”

  Yes.

  Napoleon said nothing but his thoughts were no longer his own again. He didn’t care. He liked not being lonely in his head.

  You’re surprised, Villa. Surprised that God would even have agents here?

  “Can you blame me?”

  No. I’d heard rumors of this, but never paid them much heed. The truth is, those who are here are only here by choice.

  “Volunteers?”

  Of a sort, yes.

  Coming down the dune he’d just crested, Napoleon was pleased to see a flat area of the desert ahead where the footing looked firmer.

  His memories of his grandmother still fresh in his mind, he had to ask. “So, there are angels here?”

  No. Never, The Gray Man answered firmly.

  “So. What then?”

  Souls, Villa. Of people who couldn’t leave someone behind. Some are here to seek out and find someone they’ve lost. Someone they can’t move on without. Or souls that lived a life of helping others and even now want to do the same.

  Napoleon was about to press the issue when he heard it, in the far distance, seemingly resonating over the peak of a dune off to the left. At first the sound didn’t register, and he was beginning to run it through his mind a second time when he reached the crest of the dune and saw them, like black teardrops weaving their way across the sand towards him: dogs.

  The sound he’d heard was barking.


  “Shit.”

  You hate dogs.

  “Yes. Even more than crows.”

  We should not be surprised, then, that they were sent.

  “Oh, man.”

  It’s obvious now: the enemy has decided that the best way to stop you is to scare you into making a mistake. This is good news.

  Napoleon was dumbfounded as he watched the dogs, five of them by his count, increase the speed of their charge down the dune. “Oh, really? And just how, exactly, is this good news?”

  Because you’re being toyed with. You’re an anomaly wandering around, yes, but they see you as a plaything. Not a threat. If my presence were sensed, if they’d discovered me, we’d be facing a lot worse than dogs, trust me.

  Napoleon grunted. “That’s comforting, but what now?”

  Isn’t it obvious, Villa? Run.

  Napoleon was afraid that would be the answer. But he didn’t need to be told twice. He rounded out at the bottom of the dune and hit the flat soil, which, to his relief, was solid like baked mud. For the first time since arriving here, he could actually feel the heels of his feet and dig them in. He sprinted, his calves and hamstrings crying out in protest, the sound of the dogs as they grew closer boosting him with adrenaline.

  He ran as fast as he could, straight ahead, before he decided to zigzag to the left through a string of cactus trees, then off to his right across a small ditch and up the other side. He felt The Gray Man giving him a push of some sort. The force field around him had dissipated; he could feel the wind in his hair and on his face again, as if the energy had been diverted to his fatigued legs. He hadn’t run this hard in years and he wasn’t in the best of shape, but still, he was flying. There was no way they would catch him, no way that—

  He glanced over his shoulder to get a read on the dogs’ positions and was stunned to see they were only about twenty yards behind. They were Doberman Shepherds, black with brown chests, lean and taught, with wicked pointy ears. But the worst part was their eyes, burning globes of red, and their bloody mouths with sharp, snapping teeth.

  THE ONE THING about being a cop was that you never really slept. At least not while you knew a crime had happened. If you were even halfway decent at your job, you cared about the people, the citizens, who put their trust in you, day in and day out. Whether setting up sobriety checkpoints around town on New Year’s Eve, patrolling the streets each day, or just being there to escort home a kid who’d ditched school, it didn’t matter: you were the one they depended upon to keep them or their loved ones safe. It was that simple, really.

  So when the citizens in your care started disappearing, when they were being abducted and subjected to God knows what else by someone bad out there, it was impossible not to take it personally. It was impossible to let go of the feeling that in failing to protect them, you were betraying a trust. It was impossible to let yourself off the hook, to try to get by on the fact that you couldn’t be everywhere all at once.

  So it stuck in your head and haunted you.

  And then it was impossible to sleep.

  Conch sighed. He was sitting on the back porch, his hands around a hot cup of coffee, warming his fingers as steam rose into the dark night air. It was 2:00 a.m. He’d been here before a few times over the years, when he couldn’t sleep and was forced to face that wide expanse between the dead of night and the life of dawn, fearing the clock with its merciless hands that seemed to tick backwards twice for every one increment they moved forwards.

  The last time he had been working at this hour was during the Fritos Bandit case. A nut job named Marco Adams had broken into and robbed a half-dozen homes, always when the occupants were away, and always left behind pieces of Frito chips, as if he liked to snack as he pillaged. Conch could still remember a comment by Mrs. Porter, who was the last of his robbery victims and who had stood in her living room with Conch and Kendall under an autumn sky, incredulous at what had become of her home while she’d been off visiting relatives in Portland. She’d said, with all sincerity, “It’s one thing to be a creep. But does he have to be a pig too?”

  Marco Adams was smart, in a criminal sense, which was to say he was mostly a stupid son of a bitch, but he was lucky as well.

  His luck ran out after Conch and Kendall pulled double shifts for over a week, cruising the streets in Kendall’s wife’s Kia, crammed in like sardines, their damn knees jammed so tight in the little seats that Conch had begun to fear they’d never be able to handle a foot chase if it happened for the loss of blood circulation to their legs.

  But, finally, over on Avocado and Birch, they saw a stray flashlight beam scrape over the living room drapes of a home at just past 1:00 a.m. That was lucky, but luckier still was that Kendall knew the home’s owner, Ted Bradshaw, a widower who often spent time in the same gym as Kendall and who had just told Kendall a few days before that he was going on a horseback fishing trip to Wyoming with some old college buddies.

  The Fritos Bandit was all mouth and bluster when they confronted him in the house, but people have a way of changing their demeanor when they see two guns pointed at them. Conch could still see Marco’s face opposite his gun sight, frozen, a giant bag of Fritos jammed into the open front of his Philadelphia Eagles jacket, a jewelry box in one hand and a small flat-screen TV under the other.

  He was upset at being caught, then openly distraught as they drove him back to the station after Kendall told him that there were no Frito chips in County. When all was said and done, it was discovered that Marco Adams worked at the Big 5 Sporting Goods store. What better place to work if you want to know when people were heading out of town? A little small talk, a little sales work, and before long you knew when they were leaving and whether the whole family was going or not.

  After Marco Adams had been booked and taken off to Bakersfield, Conch had gone home and slept for twelve hours straight. His town was safe again, so it was okay.

  But now? Now it was in grave danger.

  This was no robber or, like the crisis before that one, no fool jacked-up on meth setting fire to random porch flags across town.

  Jasmine White, and most likely Ashley Barton too, would be more than happy to be dealing with a burglar or drugged-out pyro right about now, instead of—

  He stopped circling his thoughts and held his mind still. Instead of what?

  The moon was waning gibbous, a term he remembered from his astronomy studies as a youngster, casting down moonlight and faintly outlining his surroundings; his big backyard was surrounded by a large pine fence, and off to the left was a BBQ island and an unlit fire pit surrounded by some cushioned patio chairs. Just beyond the patio was a wall of darkness.

  Nothing moved out there. Not a raccoon. Not a possum. The birds were in the trees and the people were in their beds, but here he was, sipping at his coffee and focused on that one question: what had taken them? A murderer? A rapist? Those were the two likeliest choices, and both of them were horrible, but still better than the third choice: a psychopath. The reality was that a murderer or a rapist would eventually screw up.

  But a psychopath was a whole different problem.

  They took cunning to a higher level, and what the public didn’t know was that most of them were finally caught only after they became bored of the game and allowed themselves to be, when their egos became so large that they were afraid they wouldn’t live on in posterity, that, like a great artist, their work would never be appreciated in their lifetimes.

  Jasmine and Ashley didn’t, as only two victims, prove that a psycho was the problem. But when added to all the other women who had left Beaury and then left the grid entirely? It wasn’t looking good.

  After the medical examiner from Kern had arrived and done his job at Jasmine White’s home, they’d all gone their separate ways. Kendall was heading up the volunteer deputies; Timmy Dane, Marisa Miller and Nathan Pinto were now setting up roadblocks on the three main roads out of town.

  Parker had gone to check into the Super 8 Motel. Sinc
e there was a chance Kyle Fasano was involved in all of this, even though Parker was suspended he still had to report to his captain in the morning and figure out where to go from there.

  Conch had gone home too. He was getting a little old for sixteen-hour shifts, and felt it. He’s been out as soon as his head had hit the pillow, then had awoke not long after, a number stuck in his eyes.

  Eighteen. That was the number. Eighteen women in total over the past ten years.

  What would they find if they went back fifteen?

  Then a worse thought: what if eighteen was all they knew about? What if there were more?

  And that’s what really had Conch unable to sleep now: what was the real number? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  When the sun came up he would call his counterparts at the surrounding sheriff’s departments: Estrada in Kern County, Matthews in Inyo, Klump in Bakersfield and Couch in Tulare. None of the missing women were from San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara or Ventura. That was a concern. Those three counties had the highest populations in the nearby areas and surely, over the years, a few ex-Beaury residents had moved to them as well. That meant this guy was probably more coyote than lion. He was a hunter of fortune and isolation, and crowded populations dampened the possibility of both. But sometimes coyotes will travel far, if they’re hungry enough.

  If the other department heads agreed with what Conch found, then this would go to the FBI very quickly. Possible psychos were their forte, after all.

  He drank a swig of coffee and rubbed his eyes.

  He didn’t like the idea of the Feds rolling in and pushing him off to the side, but maybe it was for the best. With his luck, he was going to get himself killed going after this guy.

  But if that’s what it took to protect his town? That was okay.

  It was kinda even in the job description, and every cop knew it.

  CHAPTER 21

  TAMARA HAD STOOD WATCH the entire night. What choice did she have? After Seth had convinced her not to go outside, she set herself and the kids up on the small sofa in the living room, which was against the far wall and offered a clear view of the dining room, the hall to the bedrooms and the sliding glass door to the patio out back. They were hunkered in, yes, but also cornered if something came at them again, which was why, when the kids had finally passed out from sheer exhaustion, she had swiftly crept into the kitchen to snatch a butcher’s knife, which she wrapped in a dishtowel and now had on the armrest of the sofa.