by Ninie Hammon
As a barrel wagon driver, Mr. Newton’s law served Jack every day. He’d park on an incline so the barrel wagon was slanted downhill, remove the gate on the back and attach guide rails. Then he’d pull out the chuck from behind the back barrel and watch the five-hundred-pound marbles roll off the back of the wagon, down the rails, and into a waiting elevator.
If the fire got out of control and spread all the way to the bourbon warehouse on the end, the whole waterfront district would be in danger. Probably twelve thousand barrels of booze—fifty gallons each. A single gallon of gasoline has the explosive power of ten sticks of dynamite—and alcohol burns hotter than gasoline.
By the time Jack arrived at the scene, officers from the sheriff’s department and the Harrelton Police Department had evacuated all the buildings and were operating in crowd-control mode, fanned out to keep the rubberneckers a safe distance from the blaze. The chance to see a “fire at a fireworks factory” had drawn a crowd that quickly grew to almost unmanageable proportions, the lookie-loos enjoying themselves in something like a carnival atmosphere. Everyone had phones out, shooting pictures or videos. Kids wormed their way through the crowd to stand in front where they could get a better view, some people had even brought lawn chairs. Wouldn’t have surprised Jack to see a vendor hawking popcorn and cotton candy.
The Harrelton Fire Department did everything but dump water out of the Ohio River on Nippon Pyrotechnics to keep the fire from spreading to it from the burning office building next door. But a brisk west wind was not on their side and it was soon clear their valiant efforts weren’t going to prevail. It was a cloudy night, no moon or stars visible. The sky was perfectly black by the time the relentless march of flames through the Ichikawa Building ignited the dock on the west side of the factory where fireworks were loaded onto trucks for shipment. When the crates there caught fire, an explosion of light—a bottle rocket or something—shot up into the night. About a hundred feet above the building, it burst into sparkles of brilliant red light.
The crowd sucked in a communal gasp. This is what they’d come to see!
A second explosion followed almost immediately, coloring the sky bright purple. The crowd oohed and aahed. Jack grew still. There was something familiar about—
A third explosion rumbled in the flaming dock area and there was a beat of expectancy before brilliant light splattered a color into the black nothingness above the building. Green.
At the sound of the fourth explosion, Jack closed his eyes and mouthed a word he no longer had the air to say aloud.
“…blue…”
When he opened his eyes, the sky was awash with color, brilliant blue light against the velvet darkness.
That’s what Andi saw.
Daniel’s description of Andi’s vision filled his head. “Splashes of color—first red, then purple, then green, then blue—like paint splatters, only made out of light. And after the color came the shapes.” Her vision had been about this fire, had predicted this blaze. Which meant the other elements of her vision might have something to do with it, too. But what could—?
Someone in the crowd behind Jack broke his concentration.
“Excuse me, officer,” said a gravelly voice. “I need to talk to you.”
Jack turned toward the speaker and saw a man about his own age, big—not as tall as Jack, but broader, thicker. He was dressed in a wrinkled and stained black body shirt that revealed the ripples of huge biceps under the clingy fabric. Steroid-juiced gym rats always wore body shirts. His hair was cropped tight, but Jack could tell that it was red.
The man’s only distinguishing characteristic was the startlingly pale blue of his eye—singular. He only had one. Where the left eye should have been was a crater covered by a black patch.
This fella somehow got a fish hook in his eye! How do you do a thing like that—get a fish hook—?
Surprise nailed Jack to the spot, his mind awash with expectations retreating like a wave rushing back from the shore. It had never occurred to him that he might have to face Cole in public. He’d assumed Cole would launch a sneak attack, but this was no ambush.
Jack placed his hand on the butt of his service revolver. Was he prepared to drop Cole right now, in front of a couple hundred witnesses? Actually, he was, and that mildly surprised him. But he couldn’t. He didn’t have a clear shot in this crowd and there were kids running around.
Obviously, Cole had assumed Jack wouldn’t recognize him, so Jack played along.
“What can I do for you, sir?” Jack said.
This brazen appearance must be part of some larger plan Cole’d mapped out. Now, it was his move.
“I sell insurance and Kobayashi Paper Products is one of my clients.” He hooked a thumb toward the warehouse snuggled back in the trees. “I heard about the fire—it was all over the news. So I came down a few minutes ago to see if the building or contents had been damaged. When I got inside—”
“You’ve been inside that warehouse tonight? How’d you get in? How’d you get past—?”
“I have a key and I went in a side entrance—look, how I got in’s not important. What matters is there are other people in there.”
Jack had an idea where this was going now, so he pretended to take the bait.
“All these buildings have already been evacuated and you’re telling me there are people in that warehouse right now?”
“These were homeless people and they were hiding. I just happened to come across them. They’d made a little place for themselves out of boxes. I told them they had to get out, that there was a fire. But they wouldn’t budge, so I came looking for a police officer to report it.”
Of course you did, good citizen that you are.
“If you’ll come with me, officer, I’ll show you where they are so you can get them out of the building.”
Houston, we have lift-off.
There it was, the ruse to get Jack alone.
Why he’d approached Jack here, out in public like this, was still a mystery, but it was clear Cole was eager to move his encounter with Jack away from prying eyes. Jack was equally eager to spend some private time with Cole. It wouldn’t take long. In fact, it occurred to Jack that if the Kobayashi Paper Products warehouse did eventually catch fire, Cole Stuart could simply vanish without a trace and nobody’d ever know what happened to him—because Jack had no intention of letting the man walk out of that building alive.
“Let’s go,” Jack said, and turned away from the crowd that was no longer restless and fidgety. They stood still, their rabid attention focused on the conflagration/fireworks display. No one noticed him head out across the dark parking lot with the one-eyed man, who had a serious hygiene problem. Cole smelled filthy, like he hadn’t had a bath in— Was that a fish stink? Jack wrinkled his nose in disgust.
Obviously, there was a trap set for Jack somewhere up ahead. But Jack had something of a home-team advantage here. He knew the paper warehouse well.
Secluded in the trees right at the water’s edge, the warehouse was filled with warm, cozy places to hole up for vagrants who ran the shore-side rail lines. Jack had been called here dozens of times to find the “squatters” and transport them to St. Bartholomew’s Homeless Shelter in downtown Cincinnati. The building was stacked floor to ceiling on one whole side with boxes and packing crates of every conceivable kind of paper—typing paper/copy machine/printing paper, rolls of wrapping paper, boxes filled with toilet paper, paper towels, paper plates, and napkins. The labyrinth of aisles formed by the boxes had always reminded Jack of the warehouse where Indiana Jones and company stashed the Ark of the Covenant.
As soon as they rounded the corner of the building so it blocked the view of the crowd by the road, Jack went on hyper alert. Without appearing to, his eyes scanned his surroundings, three hundred sixty degrees, looking for anything odd or out of place, darker shade, perhaps, or a shape in a shadow. The halogen light that illuminated the fence between this building and the bourbon warehouse was out.
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nbsp; There were several side entrances to the warehouse, each with a small roof jutting out over the door and a light that illuminated the area under it. Cole went to the first door, where no light shone in the overhang. The glow from the light farther down lit tiny sparkles of broken light bulb glass that crunched under Jack’s feet. The door swung easily inward before Jack had a chance to see the lock, but he was sure Cole had either jimmied or broken it.
When Cole pushed the door open, he said, “There’s a light. I’ll turn it on.” Then he vanished into the gloom.
Jack waited where he was, unwilling to walk into a dark building with a man who wanted to kill him. Then Jack saw a dim glow chase long shadows into the darkness. He knew it was the light in the “office” area where the security guard kept a desk and filing cabinet tucked away between walls of boxes next to an ancient elevator, the old fashioned, metal-cage kind with exposed cables that emitted a piercing squall when it was in use.
“Over here,” Cole hollered out from behind the wall of boxes.
Showtime.
Jack drew his Glock 22 service weapon, held it in both hands pointed at the floor as he edged, with his back to the boxes, toward the sound of Cole’s voice.
“Yo, officer. You stop to take a leak or something?”
When he got to the corner of the wall where the light spilled out onto the floor, Jack gathered himself, prepared to spin around the corner and immediately open fire, cut Cole down where he stood.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then whirled, the gun extended in front of him in both hands, a second away from pulling the trigger.
But he didn’t fire.
Cole jumped, obviously surprised to see Jack with his gun drawn, but he recovered quickly.
“Unless you want to see a smile where no smile has been before, put the gun down…Jack,” he said.
Cole stood behind a straight-backed, wooden chair on the far side of the small open space. Theresa was seated in the chair, affixed to it by what looked like half a roll of duct tape—her legs fastened to the two front chair legs, her arms to the wooden arms and there were long strips of tape wrapped around her chest and the back of the chair. A piece of tape covered her mouth. Cole stood behind her holding a vicious looking hunting knife at her throat.
Jack didn’t move, didn’t even blink, his whirring mind calculating his chances of dropping Cole before he could—
“What part of ‘put the gun down’ don’t you understand, Carpenter?” Cole said. “On the floor, now.”
Statistics were not in Jack’s favor if he complied. His own voice teaching new officers ground defense, echoed in his head. “If you give up your gun, there is a ninety percent chance the suspect will pick it up and shoot you with it.”
“You got one more chance…gun down or this lady joins our silent, grinning friend over there.”
Obviously, Cole actually had stumbled across a homeless man in the building. He was sitting upright against the back wall, placed there for effect. The gash in his slit throat was so deep it appeared his head was only balanced on his shoulders and if he slumped over, the head would roll out onto the floor like a pumpkin.
Jack surveyed the room, tried to see where Victor Alexander might be lurking. But there was no sign of him, then he slowly lowered his weapon and placed it on the floor in front of him. His eyes were on Theresa’s. He saw sorrow and regret there, sympathy, but no fear.
“The backup, too.” Jack heard little-kid pride in Cole’s voice that he’d known Jack would be packing a backup.
Jack did as he was instructed, took the .38 caliber Smith and Wesson strapped to his right ankle, and placed it on the floor in front of him.
“Now, step back away from them.”
Jack lifted his foot as if to step away, but instead reached out with the toe of his shoe and kicked both weapons hard to the right. They slid across the floor and disappeared into the three inch space under a pallet piled high with boxes.
Cole glared at him. “Think you got away with something?” Cole’s voice was colored with loathing. “If I’d needed a gun, I’d have brought one. I do better work with a knife…like to stick a man—or woman—and hear the squeal.”
Once Jack was unarmed, Cole relaxed. He kept the blade of the knife so tight against Theresa’s throat that a thin trickle of blood ran from it and disappeared into the considerable bosom below, but the tension went out of his body. Good. Jack was counting on that, because the instant Cole moved the knife away from Theresa’s neck, Jack would jump him. Over-confidence was Jack’s friend. And Cole was obviously pleased as punch with himself for getting this far.
“Chloroformed your fat friend and drove around with her in the trunk of my car for hours looking for a spot where the three of us could have ourselves a chat.” He paused. “Secluded, so all the noise you two are going to make won’t bother anybody. Then I heard about the fire and knew this is where you’d be—easy to find, I’ve got a picture. Soon as I got here, I spotted this place, big and empty and away from all the hubbub, a snug little hide-away.”
When Jack said nothing, Cole continued, the self-congratulatory tone still coloring his words.
“Was planning on getting you in here by telling you Vic had a knife to your fat nigger friend’s throat, that he’d kill her if you didn’t come with me. Then I found my man over there”—he gestured with his chin toward the dead body—“and he made a better story.”
Cole cut his eyes to where the guns lay beneath the pallet and his face hardened. “How’d you know?”
Jack didn’t respond.
Cole smiled then, or what passed for a smile split open the bottom portion of his face.
“Well, as you can see, my old friend Vic’s not holding a knife on this greasy black pig. He had a prior commitment—with your friend, Daniel.”
CHAPTER 29
Daniel was on his way home from his Saturday evening’s men’s Bible study. He hadn’t taught it. Clayton Abernathy, the chairman of the board of elders had, and Daniel had tried to connect to the lesson. But Abernathy, whose command of the Scripture was as legendary as his seeming inability to smile, might as well have been speaking Mandarin Chinese.
There was a strict ‘no cell phones’ policy in the group, and the old dudes who probably didn’t even own one made sure the rule was rigorously enforced. Daniel pulled his out of his pocket and powered it up as he drove. He had six messages. He listened to Jack’s first and after that, he ignored the other five. Daniel played the voice mail through twice, trying to get his mind around it.
This can’t be happening, not here in the real world.
The moment the words popped into Daniel’s mind a wave of déjà vu washed over him. He’d said those words, exactly those words, before.
“What’s happening is the real world, Daniel,” says the little girl beside him. “Just because not everybody can see it doesn’t mean it’s not really happening.”
Her hair is the color of sunlight and her eyes the deep blue of a stormy sea. Well, Daniel has never actually seen a stormy sea, or a sea of any kind for that matter. But it sounds good in his head when he struggles for words to capture the essence of the girl whose image never leaves his mind, night or day.
“This is some kind of distraction.” she continues. “You heard them. To get everybody’s attention, focus it here so they can get away with doing whatever else they’re planning that’s even worse. We have to do something.”
“Just the three of us against them all?” Daniel is grateful his voice isn’t shaking on the outside because his insides are quivering.
“Don’t you mean the four of us,” pipes in Mikey Rutherford but they all ignore him.
“We don’t have time to go find Bishop,” Jack says. “Whatever they’re planning, it’s now. We can follow them and—” He stops as a new thought strikes him. “They might even be going…you know—there, where it is, to its lair.”
“Lair?” Daniel is incredulous. “Jack, this isn’t an episode of Wi
ld Kingdom. There’s a monster demon out there!” But Daniel has more than a niggling suspicion that Jack doesn’t really believe that. Not deep in his bones like Daniel and Bishop and Becca do. What Jack does believe in are his feelings for Becca. And his macho attempts to impress her are going to get them all in trouble.
Jack blows by his words, intent on making his point.
“They’re up to something awful.” Urgency makes his already-a-man’s voice gruff. “You know they are. We can’t just…” his words trail off, then he continues with more strength. “Nobody will believe us! If we don’t stop them, who will?”
Jack is right, of course. They can’t just do nothing, not after what the Bad Kids did to the little Roberts boy.
His name was Joel or Joey, something like that, about five years old, maybe going into first grade this fall. His father drove a truck, hauled used bourbon barrels to wineries in California, so he was gone a lot. His mother worked as a waitress at Parker’s Restaurant, and the grandmother who looked after him was deaf as a post and almost blind. The boy’d had to look after himself, so he was independent, no whiner.
And Daniel understands that’s why Jack is so upset by what happened to him. He sees himself in the little Roberts kid.
Jack, Daniel, Becca and Mikey had been picking through the attic of the furniture store on the corner of Commerce and Baxter Streets, looking for absolutely nothing, filling up time on a lazy summer day. They had spent a few minutes earlier hanging around the white WCOH Action News First truck with the gigantic satellite dish on top that was parked in front of the courthouse. The word circulating in the crowd that had gathered around the truck was that the Cincinnati television station had sent a crew to Bradford’s Ridge to do a story on all the “strange happenings”—tortured animals, vandalism, snakes in public places.
The four of them knew way more about those goings-on than anybody else in town, knew who was responsible, but nobody would ever ask them or believe them if they told.