Final Crossing: A Novel of Suspense

by Carter Wilson

  Somewhere inside he hears the steps. They grow louder as she comes closer.

  Rudiger steps to the side. If she bothers to look through the peep hole, she’ll see no one.

  The footsteps inside stop. A few seconds pass. Rudiger thinks he might have to force himself in. Then she unlocks the door and opens it.

  Stupid.

  Rudiger swings into view, smashing his fist into the bridge of her nose before she can even think to react. She falls backwards and lands hard on the floor. Carpet keeps her skull from cracking.

  Rudiger shuts and locks the door as he listens to her wheezing and gurgling on the floor. He hums louder, losing himself in the rhythms of a song he can’t place. When he turns to her, she is groaning and grabbing her face. He pulls her hands from her face and drags her by the arms out of view from the front door.

  He drops her arms and they thud on the hallway floor. Rudiger knows she is done. She can’t move. Can’t scream. Helpless. He quickly searches the small house. No one else home.

  When he returns she stretches her face into terrified protest. Probably was hoping I was looking for money, he thinks. Or jewelry. But I came for her and her alone. Now she knows it.

  He straddles her body and squats down over her torso. His legs pin her arms to her sides. She opens and closes her eyes, as if eventually she’d open them and he’d be gone.

  “Pullee...pullee...” Her words are garbled, but Rudiger knows she is saying please. He’s an interpreter, after all.

  She begins to cry, stopping only to choke on the blood draining into her throat.

  For a second, he sees something in her eyes, a flash that pulls him back into a void. He sees the whore, standing over him, laughing as the Preacherman starts slicing up the side of his face, telling him he’s a dirty fucking boy. A sinning boy. So bad a sinner that he better hope Jesus gives him forgiveness when the Rapture comes. And that whore bitch woman just laughed as the blood poured down his face.

  The vision fades.

  The woman closes her eyes. Rudiger begins.

  5

  WASHINGTON D.C. APRIL 6

  “YOU ’RE BACK.” Veronica’s gaze swept over Jonas, noting the soft cast on his wrist. “Not too much worse for the wear. Didn’t get your pretty face too bruised up.”

  Which wasn’t true. He still had a large welt on his forehead. Jonas dropped his briefcase on his desk, looking at the clutter. He’d only been gone for three days, but three days is all it takes in politics to lose your footing permanently.

  He turned to his assistant, whom he only ever called V. Tall, athletic. Feminine to the point Jonas assumed that, at any time, only expensive lingerie separated her couture from her naked skin. She was achingly beautiful and inexplicably single, and Jonas had often been tempted to ask her out before his senses got the better of him. It was bad enough his personal life was always fucked-up. He didn’t want to do the same with his professional one.

  “You didn’t come to visit me in the hospital,” he said.

  “I did. You just weren’t conscious.” She brushed past him and dropped a stack of papers on his desk without explaining what they were. “It was the only time I’ve seen you vulnerable.”

  A dull ache resumed in the back of his head. “Then you haven’t been around me enough.”

  “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “Thanks, V. Me, too. What did I miss in the last couple of days?”

  She shrugged. “Just the normal life-and-death decisions that are made here every day.”

  “Anything actually interesting?”

  “No. Not really.” She paused. “Except Michael Calloway. You heard about that?”

  “Who hasn’t? It’s the only thing on the news.” Jonas thumbed through the stack of papers she’d given him. None of it could wait, but all of it would. “I’m catching a flight later to go to the funeral. The Senator asked me to.”

  “Need anything from me?” she asked. “You mean like a date to a funeral?”

  “I have just the outfit.”

  “I’m sure you do. But I don’t think the point of the funeral is to have all eyes on you.” Jonas flipped through the first few pages of a brief on a bill to expand coal-mining rights in western Pennsylvania. It’ll never pass, he thought. Though if it did, it would mean huge political capital for the Senator.

  “Heard you broke up with Juliette. Want to talk about it?” Jonas finally looked up and sighed. “Yeah, do you have a few hours so maybe we can braid each other’s hair and swap stories of heartache?”

  “Don’t be an ass.”

  “It’s my default position.”

  “Well, I’m here to talk if you need me.”

  “Thanks. I do appreciate it. We just...I guess she didn’t see what was worth hanging around for.”

  “Then she’s a fool.”

  He smiled. “More like an idiot savant.”

  She offered her own crooked smile and tilted one leg forward. “More fish in the sea?”

  “I’m sure there are.”

  “Good.” V crossed her arms. “You get back to work, then. I won’t bug you for at least fifteen minutes.”

  “Thanks,” Jonas muttered, finally sitting down. “Actually, V, can you do me a favor?”

  She turned. “Of course.”

  “Grab me a couple Advil, will ya?” He massaged his temples. “Actually, make it three.”

  • • •

  Jonas’s visits to his dad were usually reserved for the weekend when he wasn’t in the office (at least not all day) and when traffic was more an annoyance than an unyielding force of nature. Jonas didn’t know how his trip to Philly would play out and he wanted to see his father before he left. Sooner was always better than later. Later could be too late.

  As expected, the rush-hour roads were a snarled mess and the seventeen-mile trip was a combination of misery and boredom, assuaged only slightly by an NPR Podcast Jonas had downloaded and hadn’t yet had time to hear.

  He walked into the Jefferson Memory Care Residence as he always did, with a mixture of trepidation and sadness. Signed in at reception, gave and received familiar greetings with the staff, and headed back into the north wing of the building. He entered the code into the electronic keypad at the first set of doors and read the sign he’d read countless times before: WARNING! Elopement risk. Please close door firmly behind you.

  Through the doors and into the hallway. The smell was immediate and familiar. It wasn’t decay and it wasn’t industrial cleaner, but some mix of the two. Nurses and staff smiled at him as he passed. Residents offered blank stares or looked through him, as if his was just another ghostly presence mixed in with their twisted view of reality. Those with stronger minds sometimes looked at him with pleading eyes. Those people were few. Jefferson wasn’t the place you sent Aunt Betty when she could no longer remember how to use the microwave.

  Jonas’s mother been the caregiver for Cpt. William Osbourne (Ret.) for the first few years. The disease had come suddenly and without mercy, as such things do. The symptoms were mild at first. At first. The worst was the fourth year. Before Jefferson. His dad still understood what was happening. Barely. The man who flew over twenty combat missions over Cambodia and Vietnam slowly decayed into a ghost who shat his pants and couldn’t remember who he was.

  Then Jonas’s mother died of a brain aneurysm. No warning. She simply collapsed one day while giving her husband lunch. A neighbor coming to visit found the Captain (as he’d always been called) sitting on the kitchen floor, stroking his wife’s hair, as water boiled over onto the stove.

  Jonas hadn’t wanted to put his father in a home, but with no siblings for help and not enough money to support a live-in nurse for more than a couple of months, he had no choice. The first facility was simple, caring, and covered by the Captain’s pension. But it took just two months for the Captain to show enough violent tendencies to be “disqualified” for treatment in a private facility. That’s when things went downhill fast.

  Jeffers
on took in the violent cases. It was the bastion of last hope for those with advanced Alzheimer’s, hope being a place to die with a slice of dignity rather than a place to recover. Since arriving at Jefferson just over a year ago the Captain had lost all ability to speak and walk, and the best reactions Jonas could expect from his father were open eyes, an occasional nod, and the thinnest crack of a smile. Smiles were rare.

  Jonas keyed in the code to the second set of doors and entered the north wing. The Captain’s room was first on the right. Jonas checked there first, but he found Carolyn—an eighty-something ex-fashion designer—asleep in the Captain’s bed. Carolyn had a tendency to sleep wherever the hell she wanted.

  A familiar nurse stuck her head in the door.

  “He’s in the hallway,” she said. “God, what happened to you?”

  “Long story.” He walked down the hallway, finding his father in the corner at the far end.

  In earlier years, the Captain made the Great Santini look like a pussy. He was the warrior who had seldom spoken, but when he did, every word carried the weight of the world with it. He was the decorated soldier. The brother among his fellow soldiers. The dedicated—though distant—husband. The man to whom duty meant everything, before that very idea became a cliché. The Captain was the reason Jonas went into the military. Not to try to please his father. But to try to be his father.

  The Captain sat alone in his wheelchair, his chin touching his bony chest, his hands gripping the chair’s arms for support. He wasn’t asleep because Jonas could hear sounds emanating deep in the Captain’s throat. Sounded like humming. Jonas pulled up a cracked plastic chair and sat next to his father, silent in his attention, trying to recognize the song. After a minute he gave up.

  “Hey Dad. It’s Jonas.” He leaned down and looked up into his father’s face. The Captain’s eyes opened halfway and the humming stopped. “You look good, Dad. Real good.”

  No reaction. The humming started again.

  In warmer weather Jonas would wheel his father outside for some fresh air and sunshine on his milky skin. Too cold for that today, so Jonas picked up one of the Captain’s hands and held it tight as he recounted the week’s events.

  “Big week, Dad,” he said. “Got hit by a car. Can you believe that?” He held up his cast to prove it.

  More humming.

  “Yeah, could’ve died. But then I figured you would be

  bored as hell if both Mom and I were dead, so I decided to live.” Jonas thought he saw a smile, but couldn’t be sure. “Got a pretty bad concussion, though. Real pain in my ass. Threw up like a drunken frat boy last night because of it. And now I have to go to a funeral for someone who was crucified. Crazy fuckin’ week.”

  He looked again. The Captain was a big fan of salty language, and often a well-placed fuck or shit got a reaction. Not today.

  Jonas kept talking and the Captain kept humming, their respective sounds in a rhythm and cadence that somehow worked together, the two men in worlds far apart but still somehow connected. Jonas ran his thumb back and forth over the bones in the back of his father’s hand, a gesture he never even would have dreamed of doing when his father was healthy. It was amazing, Jonas thought, how only a disease that rendered the old man demented could allow Jonas to share affection with him.

  He even told his father about the flashback he had of Somalia. The explosion. Falling from the building. The little black arm, detached from its owner, lying in the dirt road next to him.

  “I wanted to forget,” Jonas told him. “And I thought I had, but something made me remember. Maybe it was the accident. Maybe it was just time for me to think of it again.” But there was more, wasn’t there? The car accident. The flash of his time in the Mog. They weren’t quite separate events. There was a thread between them, one connecting the other, and Jonas understood that thread, because it also passed directly through the man sitting in front of him. It was a window on mortality, a reminder that to dust we all return, and that time is short, and life not to be taken for granted. Jonas had almost died in the Mog that day. He nearly died on the Beltway. And in front of him, the reminder that even those who survive wars succumb to unconquerable foes.

  Yet there was something connecting both events. Jonas realized in both of his near-death moments, they were the only times Jonas felt truly and utterly alive. It was something beyond the adrenaline rush. Beyond the fear. His mere survival buttressed his ego, telling him he survived for a reason. That, despite all his success in life, he was meant for something more.

  The Captain tried to say something, but it only came out as a long, anxious warble.

  Time went at a different pace when you were the only side of a conversation. After an hour, Jonas had nothing else to say. If the Captain had any idea his son came to visit, the memory would soon be gone, and Jonas could only hope the time he was there gave his dad some level of comfort. Small slice of warmth. Maybe a flash of a happy memory. It all made Jonas want to live only in the moment, because sometimes it seemed that’s all there was.

  He ended his visit as he always did, with a phrase that was alien to the father and son when Jonas was growing up.

  “I love you, Dad.”

  6

  PHILADELPHIA

  A BRISK wind caught Jonas as he stepped off the rental car shuttle in Philadelphia. Jonas had been to Philly more times than he could remember—almost as many times as he’d been to Harrisburg, the state’s capital. Every time the

  Eagles lost, a little part of him died. He should have become a Steelers fan, he knew, but he just couldn’t do it.

  The trees on the side of the interstate whipped by in a flurry of barren branches. The drive took him just outside the city, and the rental car’s GPS system told him he’d arrive in twenty more minutes.

  Gave him time to think.

  His first thought was what the hell was he going to say at the funeral. The Senator had called just before Jonas boarded his plane, informing Jonas he was expected to say a few words at Calloway’s service, assuming, of course, he was agreeable to it.

  Jonas agreed. He always agreed.

  As the drive lulled him into a deepening ennui, Jonas thought about what he wanted, really wanted, with all of it. Jonas was on a trajectory, and that path was going to take him far in politics. He thought a House seat wouldn’t be too hard, and a Senate slot not beyond question in another ten years or so. And if Sidams kept ascending, Jonas could rise with him. Sidams could one day be President. Jonas could be his Chief of Staff.

  But is that what he wanted?

  He kept rising because he was good at what he did, and when you’re good at what you do, it’s easy never to question if it’s what you want to do. For all Jonas knew, he could have been a great software engineer, or police detective, or even a goddamn rodeo clown. But he always took the path that opened up before him, never bothering to look past the trees on the side of the road, never wondering if something a little different could be found by doing a little off-roading. Jonas’s life felt scripted, and even if that script led to success, it didn’t always make it fulfilling.

  The accident had woken something inside of him. Something raw. That piece of him that was pure instinct, that could smell blood, that could feel danger before it presented itself. It was the piece of him that made him want more.

  He hadn’t sensed those feelings in a long time. Not since the Mog.

  Mogadishu, Somalia.

  He’d been an Army Task Force Ranger back then. Nineteen ninety-three. Sent to a starving little country to see if something could be done about the warlords there. Jonas was twenty-three and had been with the Rangers for two years already, a young age for such an elite group. From the moment his transport had landed in-country, things had been both clear and blurry, like looking through a piece of rippled glass. There were days of boredom. There were days of humanitarian assistance. There were days of bullshit administrative duties.

  And then there were days in the shit. The kind you trained for, d
ays and weeks on end, just so you could convince yourself not to run in abject terror.

  Jonas remembered most of it. Most he had seen though the clear part of the glass. But then something happened. Something very bad. Jonas only remembered streaks of it. He viewed the last days of his tour through the rippled part of the glass, the images vague and unreliable.

  He’d shoved those images so far inside his head they hadn’t come within a stone’s throw of his consciousness in a long time. Until he was hit by a car, that is.

  Since the accident, Jonas had started seeing again. Seeing flashes—clear flashes—from nearly two decades ago. They only came in short bursts, mere fragments, but they were real enough to have happened yesterday.

  The flashes were during the time of the really bad shit. What he saw scared the hell out of him.

  It also excited him.

  7

  THERE WAS more press at the funeral than Jonas had wanted, but they had been limited to outside the church and were not allowed into the service. Michael Calloway had been more than just an important man. He was the victim of

  a gruesome killing. Crucifixion. Nasty, brutal, symbolic, personal death.

  Jonas sat in the second pew during the service, watching those around him without turning his head. Every pew was full and those not able to sit stood in the back of the church. Despite strict instructions by Calloway’s family, Jonas counted four people who surreptitiously took pictures at various points during the service. Three were men, and Jonas guessed they were all reporters who’d been able to sneak inside. When they weren’t taking pictures they were taking notes, or otherwise looking bored.

  The fourth was a woman sitting across the aisle from him. A black woman who Jonas guessed was about his own age, maybe a couple of years younger. A long black dress spilled over shapely legs. She sat erect, as if trying to get the best view without standing up. Every now and then she would close her eyes, but not out of boredom. Out of concentration, Jonas thought, as if she might have to recite the words at a later point.